From the Editor…

The seventh issue of Socrates on the Beach contains six pieces full of strong feelings pressed into hard-fought-for sentences.

Starting off, I’d like to point out Koos Prinsloo’s story “And Our Fathers That Begat Us,” translated by Louis Greenwood Lüthi. I think one of the purposes of this journal is to present pieces by writers that few people know anything about—South African writer Koos Prinsloo, who wrote in Afrikaans and died in 1994, is one of them. I’ve hardly ever had the burst of emotion after reading a story like I did after his, as the narrative seems to preview a different cast of fiction that would come to the fore at the turn of the century, notably in W. G. Sebald. The other translated piece is from the 19th century—Jean Paul’s fiction (translated by Matthew Spencer) “The Night-Thoughts of Obstetrician Walther Vierneissel on His Lost Fetus-Ideal,” presents a very short doctor who calls to mind his days as a fetus. Utterly unlike most anything under the prose sun, its dense syntax brings to mind the high Baroque prose of England’s 17th century.

Two modern day stories are included—first, Dawn Raffel’s “The Art of Living in Advance,” which is an incredible mystery story, romance, and an allegory of bitter artistic truths all wrapped into one. Then there is Bennett Sims’s “The Postcard.” An epic noirish tale of a detective journeying to a seaside hotel to find out if a ghost is sending postcards, it bends time and our perceptions tied to knowing and not-knowing in most intriguing ways.

Two extraordinary essays round out the issue. Curtis Brown’s “Sailing to Stamboul (August Kleinzahler’s Late Style)” takes a formidable and lyrically-sweet journey through the rich poetic world of Kleinzahler, especially his latest book “Snow Approaching on the Hudson,” while Alina Stefanescu’s “Unmailed Letters, Three Rings, the Inheritance, and Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann” vibrantly pairs two renowned literary figures with the achingly personal to forge a complex and ghostly understanding between history and metaphor.

Thank you for visiting. I hope you will enjoys these works.

Greg Gerke