From the Editor…

The twelfth issue of Socrates on the Beach is large and the most international one—eight of the ten writers are from outside of the United States. It’s also weighed heavily towards fiction, starting off with an excerpt from Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke’s wonderful new novel, The Ballad of the Last Guest, which picks up one of Handke’s indelible narrators at the beginning of a journey back to his homeland. Thereafter is Chapman Caddell’s “The Detective”—a terrific modern noir story set in the Bay Area. The next two pieces are blocks of text—the first is Chris Eaton’s “Aby Warburg Recalls his College Days in Three Different Locations,” an epic look at the main character’s life in foreign cities, and then Michael Farrell’s “What is Irony?” a delicious sort of neo-lecture on irony in fiction. Then there are Selen Ozturk’s adventurous two stories, one on Michel Houellebecq and one on Rothko, following by another one sentence piece of fiction, the wry and funny and painful “Stansted” by Philip Traylen. And while not strictly fiction, we are pleased to present Rebecca Ariel Porte’s excerpt from her forthcoming book, On Earthly Delights: A Novel Theory of Paradise, which concerns a Seducer telling the narrator about the history of the world in order to find out if one might know Paradise if we saw it. Finally, there are excerpts from Christina Tudor-Sideri’s next book, An Absence of Sea. Readers will find her familiar style changed, with no punctuation, lending the writing a keen formative quality. 

On the non-fiction side there is Daniela Cascella’s “Auroras (For the voice of María Zambrano),” a wonderfully inventive piece that is hewn out of a different look at the sounds and sights of words. Then there is Steven Moore’s “Disclosing Carol Hart,” in which Moore examines a very under-read current author, including a hoax novel she wrote in the voice of John Milton’s daughter.

Certain spellings from across the ocean have been retained. Thank you for visiting.

Best,

Greg Gerke