Gobshite Quarterly #17/18

contributors include:

Prize-winning Argentine Luisa Valenzuela, an early exponent of magical realism, who writes about mothers and knives; Argentine poet Carlos Barabrito, who writes about John Cage. New Yorker Liz Swados cartoons. Susan Daitch, who dissects a nightguard's sympathy with robots, Croatian artist Miroslav Nemeth, who describes his childhood in Zagreb in black & white linocuts, Croatian short story writer Gordon Nuhanovi, who becomes a spectacle at the hairdresser's. Also, Croatian poet Tomislav Marijan Bilosni returns. Among Pacific Northwest writers, David Hapgood travels to Morocco, Jenny Forrester stands up to Colorado bullies, Coleman Stevenson has breakfast, Kassten Alonso goes to a punitive school on a punitive school bus, but learns to type. And there are feuilletons, typewriter collages, poetry from Lithuania, an Australian comic report on a trip to New York... A compendium of the global contemporary.

Pan-lingual Gobshite Quarterly, where Paul Krassner meets Vnus Khoury-Ghata, is my favorite source for Hungarian fiction that reads like a song ("Hogy jaj. jaj. jaj. semirol semmi fogalma nines..."). Here English language poems, short stories, and "reasoned rants" nervously traverse a dark alley, past hipster Arabs, dangerous Czechs, Spanish cantoras...

- Chris Dodge, Utne Magazine