By David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review Contributor
J. A. Tyler has quite an astonishing number of works out recently, including INCONCEIVABLE WILSON, which was recently excerpted in PANK magazine, In Love with a Ghost, and, among other works, two chapbooks, and has no fewer than three books due out this year. What I’ve read of Wilson’s work focuses on the fragility of self, its parts, its dismantling. His most recent book A Man of Glass & The Ways We Have Failed shares this theme. “I remain, remainders,” the speaker in INCONCEIVABLE WILSON says, “the parts, pieces. I am dismantled. Tools and instruments and me taken apart.”
Even the genre Tyler writes in—he terms his longer works novel(la)s—dovetails with that sense of fractured identity. A Man of Glass… centers on one character’s point of view like a novella. It has stanzas instead of paragraphs, …MORE
by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor
 It’s been exhausting trying to keep up with Edith Pearlman lately. She contributed a wonderful story, “Last Words,” in issue 23.1 before publishing her collection of new and selected stories Binocular Vision. After receiving the Pen/Malamud Prize for short fiction, she was nominated as a National Book Award finalist. The finalists for the National Book Critics Circle awards were announced this weekend and guess who is a finalist: Edith Pearlman. Pick up your copy of issue 23.1 today and read “Last Words” to see what all the fuss is about.
If you live within shouting distance of West Lafayette, be sure to join us on Tuesday, March 27th when we’ll be honored to have Edith Pearlman on campus for a reading and Q&A session. I have a feeling …MORE
by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor
Thursday, December 1st, Shannon Cain will be taking part in the Purdue Visiting Writers Series on the Purdue campus in West Lafayette, Indiana. Please join us at the Krannert Auditorium, Room 140 at 7:30. Shannon Cain will be reading from her debut collection The Necessity of Certain Behaviors. The event is free and open to the public.
 Jane, the protagonist of “This is How it Starts,” the first story in Shannon Cain’s debut collection The Necessity of Certain Behaviors and winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize from University of Pittsburgh Press, is a girlfriend to both a married lawyer, who happens to be man, and a doctor, who happens to be a woman. She is also an artist living in her family’s rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan who paints on panes of …MORE
by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor
 Bonnie Nadzam was born in Cleveland, went to high school in suburban Chicago, and has moved continually westward since then. She studied English literature and environmental studies at Carleton College, and earned an MA and PhD from the University of Southern California. Her fiction and poetry have been published in The Kenyon Review, The Mississippi Review, Story Quarterly, Callaloo, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and others. She taught at Colorado College, where she served for two years as the Daehler Fellowin Creative Writing. She is married to her childhood love and lives with him in the Rocky Mountains.
Be sure to read our review of Bonnie Nadzam’s debut novel Lamb here.
Sycamore Review: One of the most striking aspects of Lamb is the narrator who occasionally steps in to introduce Lamb as “our …MORE
by Conor Broughan
 When your kitchen is a mess—a plates-piled-high-in-the-sink, socks-getting-stuck-on-sticky-spots mess—how do you react? If you’re anything like me, a messy kitchen means that you clean up the coffee table in the living room or pick up clothes that have collected at the foot the bed. Rather than tackling dirty dishes, the grime on the sink, or whatever it is that has been growing behind the stove, I project the mess onto other portions of the apartment, allowing me to clean a minimal amount while still feeling accomplished for tackling a chore.
When we first meet David Lamb, the fifty-four year-old protagonist of Bonnie Nadzam’s beautiful, unsettling, and stunning debut novel Lamb, he has just buried his father, has recently divorced his wife, and has been forced to take a leave of absence from his job because of …MORE
 by Conor Broughan
It’s been a big year for Issue 23.1 contributor Edith Pearlman. In January, Lookout Books published Binocular Vision, a career spanning collection of new and selected stories. In June, she received the prestigious Pen/Malamud Award by the Pen/Faulkner Foundation. Today, the National Book Foundation announced that Binocular Vision is finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Congratulations!
Oh yeah…she also contributed her wild and wonderful “Last Words” in Sycamore Review’s Winter/Spring 2011 issue. Be sure to check out our review of Binocular Vision and interview with Edith Pearlman before you pick up your own copy of Issue 23.1 here.
Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor
 The editors at Sycamore Review were thrilled when judge Antonya Nelson chose Joe B. Sills story “The Duck” as the 2011 Wabash Fiction prize winner. Nelson said of the story, “This story stands out for being both entirely original, and entirely paying homage to the father of short story writers, Anton Chekhov. It looks backward, it looks forward. It is spare, clever, elusive, and utterly satisfying.” We couldn’t agree more. We wanted to catch up with Joe and ask him a few questions about his story, Chekhov, and the relationship between medicine and writing. Read an excerpt of the Wabash prize winning story here.
Sycamore Review: One thing that became quite clear after reading your Wabash Fiction Contest-winning story “The Duck” and taking a look at Contributor’s Note is that you have a …MORE
by Joe B. Sills
Little by little I am entering into a fantastic world.
-Chekhov
The first snow of winter falls on The Taganrog Gymnasium for Boys. Students exit from a wide doorway, each of them uniformed in a dark blue tunic with a long row of copper buttons. A first-grader removes his cloak and sits on it, then demands that someone pull him. An icicle is plucked from the corner of a windowsill, is sucked on, stolen, and hurled at a sparrow. The Greek instructor removes half a sausage from his pocket and inspects it. He gives it a nibble and walks homeward, weaving through a row of skeletal elms.
Anton waits until there is no one left to follow him. He shapes snow into five tiny spheres and assembles them along a low railing. Once he has eaten them, he makes five more. …MORE
 Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor
Many readers of Sycamore Review are also writers. So we wanted to pose a few craft questions to contributor Naomi Williams that might illuminate her process and techniques when writing “Items for Exchange” which can be read in its entirety in Issue 23.2-Summer/Fall 2011.
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by Naomi J. Williams
PLAUSIBILITY
He always forgets how unpleasant the crossing from Calais is. He has never once made the trip that there wasn’t inclement weather, contrary winds and tides, unexplained delays, seasick fellow-travelers, surly packet captains, or dishonest boatmen waiting to extort the passengers ashore. This time it is all of the above, and by the time he reaches Dover, he has, of course, missed the stagecoach to London. He spends the night at the Ship Hotel, where he endures a hard, …MORE
by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor
Congratulations to Issue 23.1 contributor Edith Pearlman who has been selected to receive the 2011 Pen/Malamud Award! The award recognizes a body of work that demonstrates excellence in the art of short fiction and we here at Sycamore Review know that no one deserves the award more after publishing Pearlman’s thought-provoking, speculative short story “Last Words” in our last issue.
The award follows a busy year for Edith Pearlman who also published Binocular Vision, a collection of new and selected stories with Lookout Books. Be sure to read our review of Binocular Vision and our recent interview with Edith Pearlman before you order your copy of Issue 23.1. This award was a long time coming and is well deserved. We can’t wait to read more Edith Pearlman stories …MORE
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