RETORT MAGAZINE

In 2007 Retort published all new content in web 2.0 format, which is just a fancy blog type thing. Anyway, over Christmas Retort had a blackhat hacker delete all of 2007, which really, really sucks. So I have decided to go back to good old fashioned .htm. If you have been directed here looking for a particular article, chances are it was one of many deleted. I have started to reconstruct as much content as possible from 2007 and much of it is now back online but linked from the homepage. http://www.retortmagazine.com. The rest I am restoring in the background as time permits.

Click http://www.retortmagazine.com for all the latest.

So while away on my Christmas holidays some WANKER hacked Retort Magazine and deleted almost all published articles from 2007. I find this very very annoying and discouraging. I am lost for words - a whole years work - gone…

Lucid Fiction: Beyond Anti-Stories
By Tantra Bensko

Though the experimental literary anti-stories push apart the structures of traditional plot arc, they may still be required to have conflict according to the current literary concessions. They disregard the idea of having to have only one character’s perspective. But Ethan Joella, in “In Breach of the Story: Braking the Shackles of Traditional Fiction,” http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/IFR/article/viewFile/704/1034, in International Fiction Review 33 page 38, 2006, describes how innovative the short story genre was earlier, but how conventional it has become. He does contend that in any case, even anti-stories rest on making an emotional impact.

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Letter To My Sweet-smelling Woman Waiting
by Tom Sheehan

Ah sweet marrow ganglia matter of mind what inviolable pleasure brings me to my typer this time of night in the moonspill mooncream what draws me this way and that from my outer to my inner am I all questions in this mushrooming quiet and dark of night this sound of dead foxes hanging thinly with leaves the den not returned to mother hunted while hunting and dogged down this deep of night this dread of sleeping while my mind can still move its way over the wave of things can extrapolate conjure figment articulate touch smell know once again the musk I could die for right now this instant this eternity for my nares have the memory of fingers and the dry pulp beneath my nails is your residue of love I cannot manicure away ashes of our fire.

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In Company

Presence in absence
in
a half open door
an unmade bed
the television on
the radio off

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He sat alone at Grand Central. The dull light was good to his eyes and the spinning in his head had stopped since he’d sat down. He was going up to 110th street. It was early, he’d left when she was still asleep. Stolen the beer from her fridge. Drank it walking down 33rd, his head aching like a busted bone, eye’s rare under broken early sunlight sliding past trees and tenements. Trains had come and gone but he just sat. Looked at the shifting reflection darkly, the movie flicker window reel of himself drinking beer on the sly, reading dying Kerouac, the fatal mirror zoom spool then darkness smack when it had passed. The suck of the void. He felt ill. Sick. No sleep hardly, a ton of booze, sex he couldn’t remember. People looked at him and he stared back when he could, some of the prettier girls gave him something inside but the rest was nonsense. When he was a kid, home in Fremantle, his mother had come maybe an hour late to pick him up at the station once. Read the rest of this entry »

OK, I get it - COMA by Paul Kavanagh is too extreme, I will ‘unpublish’ the offending text. Please, stop unsubscribing, I get it, everyone hates the story. This is the 2nd time I have had to withdraw an article and it’s the 1st time I have done it voluntarily.

The Editor, humbly apologetic if your stomach was turned by something your mind consumed.

Dear Retort Readers

Apologies for the sparodic updates of late, my life keeps getting in the way of publishing literature. There has been no shortage of submissions, I am seriously well read these days, a lot of it never read before, or by very few. Unfortunately a lot of it is destined to remain that way - is that too harsh? There is a lot of excellent poetry and literature being written also, although I must say that some of it is hard going, even for me… I mean, I read deSade before bed, but holy shit there is some dark and twisted literature turning up in my inbox. Is this a symptom of the times? A natural evolution for evil personas in literature is to take on characteristics of perversion that occur in the real world and I am seeing more and more serial killers, pedophiles and even cannibals in Armani business suites turning up in contemporary fiction. As I said, I am a fan of macabre literature and corpse poetry, I eagerly ripped of the plastic binding that American Psycho was packaged in and read it straight through. But lately there are a lot of contendors in the dark fiction market, perhaps too many?
I have no intention of publishing too much of this type of writing, just the outstanding stuff, like Paul Kavanagh’s COMA which made me throw up in my mouth and prompted several readers to abuse me - one even thinks I have gone to the devil… please, remain objective, even if I do publish a serial killers real life diary entry by mistake. You know that Retort publishes ‘cutting edge’ literature, just think of  it as literal in this circumstance.

Anyways… thanks for reading

Brentley

editor(@)retortmagazine.com