SSW: Joyce Carol Oates: "Sex with Camel"; Carmen Maria Machado: "Especially Heinous: 272 Views of LAW AND ORDER: SVU": THE AMERICAN READER, May/June 2013, edited by Uzoamaka Maduka: Short Story Wednesday

"Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law and Order: SVU" by Carmen Maria Machado

"Sex with Camel" by Joyce Carol Oates

For more on The American Reader, please click here.

Two stories, a short story by J. C. Oates and a novelet (the magazine dubs it a novella, and it's close to being an either-way call) by Carmen Machado, the two biggest names (in terms of literary careers in the U.S.) a decade+ after this issue's appearance as they were (or in Machado's case, was becoming) at time of publication.

Joyce Carol Oates's story is a fairly straightforward account of what's running through the minds of a grandmother and her adolescent grandson, as she goes through some workups and examinations during cancer treatment and he comes along with her to the labyrinthine hospital; the title is a reference to one of the jokes the teen tells her as she drives them to the appointments, after she asks him to tell her something amusing. It gives impressions of how things work in U. S. medicine these years (a decade ago, much as now), and is otherwise impressionistic,  recounting the grandson's peregrinations around the hospital, including into the adjoining eating disorders suite, while his gran goes through her examinations...a conversation he has, for example, with an apparently to him beautiful teen girl a few years older than he, even given her starvation, who's disinhibited and slightly abrasive in her conversational style by one of the meds she's been given. The views and concerns the boy and the woman have of and for each other are explored.  It's a bit "looser" than many Oates stories, but has the earmarks of her work, and is a solid example thus.

Carmen Maria Machado's story is a metafiction which uses as its skeleton the episode titles of each of the episodes of Law and Order: SVU broadcast up to the time of the story's composition (if she was writing it today, it might have to be at least a short novel, if following its current format), and using the relationship and basic situations between the primary characters Benson and Stabler (in the early seasons of the series) as a springboard for ruminations on how they might find themselves growing increasingly divorced from even their portrayed reality, their lives and jobs, as they navigate the sequence of sex-related and child-abuse-related crimes they are tasked with investigating, detailed by vignettes inspired more by the titles of the episodes of the series than by their plots. It's a clever and often funny approach, even given the seriousness at its heart, which the subject matter of both story and series requires, even as the series can and does manage to traduce that requirement at times via a certain mechanical quality in its scripting...one of the aspects the story gets at, as it also introduces elements such as doppelgangers of the principals, named Hensen and Abler, who seem to be more efficient usurpers of the protagonists' lives and careers. It makes its points, beyond the obvious stunt value of its premise.

For more of today's stories, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

THE AMERICAN READER: 2012-2015 (10 issues) and some web content: edited by Uzoamaka Maduka; Monday Fiction Magazine #1

The American Reader was an ambitious project, perhaps even the equivalent of post-grad work for its principals, very much including the founding editor-in-chief and chief public face of the magazine, the (at founding) 25-year-old Ms. Uzoamaka "Max" Maduka, a Nigerian-American who was interested in demonstrating that there was a market among her generation of readers for relatively sophisticated literary work, but not afraid of a sales pitch leaning into would-be glamor, perhaps a fair amount of the latter driven by fund-raising necessity but perhaps also due to the desire to be On the Scene in NYC-based publishing and overlapping communities...the kind of social whirl around magazines ranging from The Paris Review to National Review (only presumably without the CIA connections and/or funding both of those had early on), and seeking the kind of stability that, say, Harper's had achieved through its institutional heir publisher. The subtitle on the cover of the first year+'s issues was "A Monthly Journal of Literature and Criticism"--it managed two monthly issues in its slightly longer than two-year run; it went to "A Bimonthly Journal...", also a schedule they couldn't maintain. But, then, essentially no one has been able to jump into the market in the last half-century or so with a monthly literary magazine...even the hardiest examples have tended to start with quarterly or bimonthly publication, and presumably with more capital on hand in most cases (and this includes the theoretically "more commercial" fiction magazines in fantastic fiction and crime fiction, where the long-running titles are mostly bimonthly these years and often were introduced, even back in the 1940s as well as in the '70s, as quarterlies). And the issues I've seen were ad-free, except for a very few house ads (touting subscriptions and their website, which featured some extra content at times).

I picked up at least a couple/few issues of the magazine during its run. I never saw the first issue, the only one in saddle-stapled format--see photo of the stack below--and with a cover stock that was easily crumpled; the balance of issues were "perfect-bound" (with glued signatures) and with a heavier stock; the new cover format was patterned (notes Amy O'Leary in New York Times coverage linked at the bottom of the post) after a French political journal, Le Contrat Social, with illustrations soon added with the flavor of another 1950s inspiration, the work of art director George Salter at the Mercury Press magazines such as The American Mercury, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and their Mercury Mystery and other newsstand periodical book lines, packaged and sold similarly to their magazines. 

The one issue I've recently turned up in my reorganization of my library is the May/June 2013 issue (still in the "monthly" subtitle era!), so I'll provide an index and links to the American Reader web archive of those contents as I find them (the site Really Could use a search function, at least).

Maduka, upon the folding of her magazine, had already joined the board of Lapham's Quarterly, and subscription fulfillment for her magazine was offered with issues of that magazine, which (as it happens) officially folded late last year.

What remains of the TAR website;  TAR's pretty good Facebook "wall"...which has been abandoned, and thus has some porn spam in comments on late posts, but still has many interesting links--and is the closest thing to an index the site has.

Karen Joy Fowler interviewed by Carmen Maria Machado

The first issue, October-November 2012

The American Reader, May-June 2013, V 1 No 5/6, edited by Uzoamaka Maduka. 172pp plus covers, $10. Irregular publication intervals, not quite bimonthly throughout its run.

3 * Anonymous/uncredited * Contributors * biographic blurbs

6 * Jacqueline Waters * Candor * poem

11 * Matthew Rohrer * The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg at the Grey Gallery, NYC * pm

12 * Matthew Rohrer * Hide in the Clouds * pm

13 * Matthew Rohrer * Two Poems for Issa * pm

14 * Matthew Rohrer * Dark Inside, Bright Outside: A Magritte * pm

15 * Matthew Rohrer * Bullshark * pm

16 * Liam Hysjulien * Stone, Deep, Mountains * pm

17 * Liam Hysjulien * The South * pm

18 * Liam Hysjulien * Teachers * pm

19 * Jameson Fitzpatrick * Adolescence * pm

20 * Jameson Fitzpatrick * Apart * pm

22 * Otto Jaffe * The South of France * ss

27 * Joyce Carol Oates * Sex with Camel * ss

40 * Ramon Isao * Feats * ss

55 * Carmen Maria Machado * Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law and Order: SVU * novelet

92 * Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon * Scenes of Emancipation: On Jacques Rancière 's Aisthesis * essay

96 * Jacques Rancière * The Cruel Radiance of What It Is: Hale County, 1936-New York, 1941 * excerpt, Aisthesis, translated by Zakir Paul, translation Verso, 2013

111 * South Korea * group/translations

112 * Jenny Wang Medina* Introduction * in

115 * Hwang Byeong-Seung * First * pm, translated by Chae-Pyong Song and  Darcy L. Brandel

116 * Moon Tae-Jun * A Brief Nap * pm, translated by Chae-Pyong Song and  Darcy L. Brandel

117 * Moon Tae-Jun * The Ibis * pm, translated by Chae-Pyong Song and  Darcy L. Brandel

118 * Moon Tae-Jun * A Pair of Shoes in the Yard * pm, translated by Chae-Pyong Song and  Darcy L. Brandel

119 *  Park Min-Gyu * Castella * ss, translated by Sora Kim-Russell

129 * Kim Aeran * Flugdatenschreiber * ss, translated by Jamie Chang

145 * Book Reviews (illustrated with uncredited spot/clip art)

146 * Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon * Francesco Pacifico's The Story of My Purity (FS&G 2013) * br

151 * Drew Calvert *Anne Carson's Red Dog (Knopf 2013) * br

156 * Eli S. Evans * A. G. Porta's The No World Concerto (Dalkey Archive Press 2013) * br

160 * Reed Cooley * New Poetry Roundup: Ray Amorosi's Lazarus (Lost Horse Press 2013), Charles Bernstein's Recalculating (University of Chicago Press 2013), Nicholas Hundley's The Revolver in the Hive (Fordham University Press 2013)

168 * Uzoamaka Maduka * Editorial Epilogue: A Woman in Love, In Love, In Love * ed

back cover: painting by Andrew Kim (a detail from which is on the front cover)

"Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law and Order: SVU" by Carmen Maria Machado

"Sex with Camel" by Joyce Carol Oates

Press Coverage, beginning and end: 

New York Times: Amy O'Leary: Uzoamaka Maduka Leaves a Paper Trail with The American Reader

The Observer: All the Happy Young Literary Women: Opening Up The American Reader by Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke 

"Literary magazine The American Reader to shutter" by Kelsey Sutton, Politico 9/23/15 3:53 PM ET

And I hope everyone has had a good Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, even given most of the weather in the U.S....