Augury Books’ Reading Period Approaching

Felice Beato’s hand colored photograph courtesy of the Public Domain Review

Augury Books is happy to announce that our spring/summer 2015 reading period opens for submissions on May 1st! This year we’ll be accepting poetry manuscripts, as well as short fiction collections and creative nonfiction collections. For more on guidelines and submissions head over to our Submittable page. Stay tuned for more updates, and get excited!

An Excerpt from Finalist J.T. Townley’s "A Love Supreme"

One beautiful spring afternoon full of sunshine and pollen, we had Shawn and Deb over. We barbecued out on the patio, burgers and sausages and whatever the women were having. Plenty of potato salad and baked beans. We drank beers and watched some of the Giants game. We told stories and joked at each other’s expense. While Supreme Leader was distracted, we laughed and laughed and laughed.

We hadn’t thought to run our little shindig by him. He was still only seven or eight years old, going on forty-five.  Some days, today included, he seemed perfectly content to play with his toy soldiers by himself down in the rec room.  (He had hundreds of them; maybe it wasn’t just play.) Still, he eventually heard us clanking dessert plates and clinking beer bottles. He marched outside, glaring at us, each in turn. He wore tiny, black jackboots polished to a high gloss.

Jon-Davis! he screamed.

I took a long drink of beer and said, Yes, son?

He balled his fists. His face went stony.

No son, Jon-Davis! You call Supreme Leader!

Shawn chuckled. He sure is a feisty bugger.

And cute as a cupcake! said Deb.

Supreme Leader fumed but said nothing. I thought his fat little head might pop off.

Honey? said Maggie. Would you like a cheeseburger? Daddy made one for you on the grill. Come sit down. I’ll get a bun and fix it just the way you like it.

Silence! yelled Supreme Leader.

We all sat up straight in our chairs, holding our breath.

No bugger, no cupcake, no honey! You call Supreme Leader!

Always fidgety, Maggie shifted in her chair, fingering up cake crumbs.

Imperialist pigs! he hollered. Stuffing faces!

Don’t get excited, I ventured. It’s just a little Sunday cookout among friends.

It’s a family tradition, said Shawn.

So know-it-all! Supreme Leader shrieked. Yet know nothing!

He paused to catch his breath. He was more worked up than I’d ever seen him, sweat beading on his fat upper lip.  He was starting to worry me. Maggie, too. I could see it in her eyes.

Soon you learn, he said.  Supreme Leader will teach.

He waited for his words to sink in, though none of us had a clue what he was talking about. We wouldn’t have taken him seriously anyway. No one said a word.  We listened to the happy chirp of kids playing in the park. Across the street, the neighbor was washing his Corvette in the driveway. The awkward silence grew like a throat cancer.

Does he talk like that all the time? Deb asked when she couldn’t stand it any longer. It’s adorable!

We laughed our nervous laughs.

We can’t figure out where he picked it up, said Maggie.

Shawn finished his beer and cracked another, gazing at Supreme Leader the entire time.

Know who he reminds me of? he asked. That what’s-his-name over there.

Could you be a little more specific, sweetie?

Hold your horses, he said. I’m getting to it.  It’ll come to me.

We waited. Supreme Leader looked dour.

You know, that Kim Something Whatever?

Where we had the war all those years back? said Deb.

Exactly.

Maggie sipped her lemonade. That’s what we were going to name him, she said. If he was a girl.

What? said Shawn.

Kim, I said.

Deb smiled and said, That’s a beautiful name.

I’m telling you, said Shawn, he’s a dead ringer.

Supreme Leader’s expression softened. He flashed his pointy teeth and said:

I so happy you notice!

We looked on, nonplussed. It didn’t faze Supreme Leader.

Now we ready, he said.

For what? asked Shawn.

Supreme Leader snapped a salute.

You see, he said.

Yet for almost a week, nothing changed. Not really. We went about our daily routine. I filed stories, Maggie cleaned teeth. We only got one call from Mrs. Wallace and none at all from Principal Vernon. Supreme Leader still gave orders and demanded strict discipline, but he seemed less edgy in his drill sergeant routine, his screaming softer, his grimaces less disparaging.

Maybe we weren’t paying close enough attention.

Because Saturday morning a cargo plane landed on our front lawn. We usually would’ve mustered for PT at dawn, awakened by Supreme Leader’s bullhorn screech. We would’ve run eight miles, then sipped bad coffee after cold showers.  Today Supreme Leader let us sleep in. But the roar of jet engines outside our bedroom window was disconcerting.  The panes rattled, the four-poster shook, Maggie’s collection of ceramic elephants clattered to the floor. We thought it was an earthquake and hunkered in the bathroom, adrenaline pumping though we were still half-asleep. Then we heard Supreme Leader shrieking through his bullhorn:

Wake, capitalist dogs!

Soldiers in drab green uniforms with scarlet collars hustled us down the hall and out the door. They shouldered AK-47s and gripped M68 pistols and screamed at us in a language we didn’t understand. Supreme Leader gave orders the soldiers followed.

Where did he learn to speak that? Maggie wondered.

Our boy is a genius! I said, glowing.

It was a beautiful morning, clear and cool. Fingers of fog stretched over the mountains. The blooming azaleas smelled sweet and heavy. We stepped across the decimated lawn, rutted with landing gear tracks. In the driveway, my Ford and Maggie’s Chrysler had been crushed like aluminum beer cans. So had the neighbor’s Corvette. We trudged up the cargo ramp. The soldiers followed us, and Supreme Leader followed them, still shrieking through his bullhorn.

Once we were airborne, I asked, Where are we going?

On Supreme Leader’s signal, the soldiers broke into an anthem of sorts. Not the most melodic in the world. Maybe it was the singers.

Where you think? said Supreme Leader when they’d finished. He grinned his pointy-toothed grin. The Fatherland!

J. T. Townley has published in Collier’s, Harvard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Istanbul Review, Prairie Schooner, The Threepenny Review, and other places.  He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and an MPhil in English from Oxford University, and he spent time at Fundación Valparaíso, Spain as a fiction fellow.  A Pushcart Prize nominee and Fulbright Scholar, he teaches at the University of Virginia.

Kate Angus Writes on Poetry Readership and Keeping Poetry Sales Alive

“Ripple Effect on Water” courtesy of Sergiu Bacioiu, Wikimedia Commons

Augury editor Kate Angus’s article on The Millions today discusses the audience for poetry (wider than people often think!) and strategies that independent presses such as Augury are using to increase sales. In her article, Angus shares the idea that because of the increased capability of reading poetry outside of a bookstore or a library, Americans might in fact be reading more poetry than ever. Things like the “Poetry in Motion” project in New York, along with the increase of sharing poetry through social media, have sparked a higher readership in the US, and people have access to more poetry than they did in the past.

Thanks to the ease of sharing poems through email and social media, it’s possible that poetry’s audience might be greater now than ever. According to The Academy of American Poets director Jen Benka, the Academy’s Poem-a-Day has over 300,000 readers, so large an audience that the Hearst Corporation recently partnered with the Academy to include the poems in their online and print newspapers and magazines.”

While the readership for poetry might have increased, book sales are down overall when it comes to people wanting to actually buy poetry. In her article, Angus outlines some of the ways that smaller presses are trying to keep poetry sales alive, such as widening readership in general by branching out to publish other genres in hopes that someone reading a short story might see what else a press has published, therefore becoming interested in the published poetry.

Our hope is that readers who like the prose we publish may discover, as they poke around our catalog, that they like the poetry too (and vice versa). “

For more on poetry readership, as well as many other ways that presses are trying to increase the sale of poetry, check out Angus’ full article here.

Only 10 days left in Augury’s reading period – Submit your manuscript now!

The Salt Lake Tribune Talks to Halina Duraj About THE FAMILY CANNON

Halina Duraj, author of THE FAMILY CANNON

Halina Duraj’s THE FAMILY CANNON (Augury Books, 2014) was recently featured in the Salt Lake Tribune, along with four other new books with Utah-related storylines and themes. The Tribune writes of Duraj:

“While living in Utah, Duraj says her writing was influenced by the drama of the desert landscape and local landmarks, such as the Oquirrh Mountains, which for a time she thought were named for the color ochre. ‘All that subtly influenced the way I was writing, which became more spare,’ she says. Her stories are carefully observed, never overexplained, while the language is both playful and precise. The collection’s final story, ‘The Company She Keeps,’ is searingly honest and particularly heartbreaking.”

See the full article here.

More on THE FAMILY CANNON

 

 

Augury Books’ reading period is open — Submit your manuscript!

Halina Duraj's "The Family Cannon" Reviewed in Quarterly West

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“Time in The Family Cannon,” by Shena McAuliffe, from Quarterly West issue 82

Quarterly West is a literary journal put together by the PhD writing program at the University of Utah. The most recent issue houses a review of Halina Duraj’s The Family Cannon (Augury, 2014) by Shena McAuliffe, who has detailed time and possession of memory in Duraj’s book graphically (chronology pictured above). McAuliffe relishes the emotional weight that Duraj’s stories hold:

“At the end of each story, I had to take a break before moving on to the next—a break from the disappointed desires, the steadfast self-sacrificing mother, the madness and the ghosts, the struggle to remember, to say things just as they should be said. In the end, what is most striking about Duraj’s book is how it moved me; it exhausted me in the way that a good story should.”

Alongside McAuliffe’s review in the summer issue is a creative nonfiction piece by Augury editor Kate Angus. Read both and learn more about the journal at the Quarterly West website.

 

More on THE FAMILY CANNON

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Augury Books’ reading period is open — Submit your manuscript!

 

Augury Author Halina Duraj Wins 2014 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction

Halina Duraj, whose debut short fiction collection, The Family Cannon, was published by Augury Books this past January, will appear in this year’s O. Henry Prize  anthology. Widely regarded as one of “the most prestigious awards for short fiction” (The Atlantic Monthly), the O. Henry prizes are awarded each year to twenty short stories selected from the pages of thousands of literary magazines. Duraj will appear alongside such luminaries as National Book Award winner Louise Erdrich and Whitbread Award winner William Trevor. Duraj’s short story “Fatherland” originally appeared in Harvard Review. The 2014 O. Henry Prize anthology was edited by Laura Furman and will be published by Anchor Books in early September.

Publishers’ Weekly has a full list of the O. Henry prize winners.

Order THE FAMILY CANNON new from Augury Books here.

Congratulations, Halina!

 

Submit your manuscript to Augury Books — Our reading period is open!