Santa Monica Review Releases Fall 2024 Issue

Author Readings Celebrate Release of Fall 2024 Santa Monica Review on Oct. 6

SANTA MONICA, CA — Santa Monica College (SMC) announces the release of its fall 2024 edition of Santa Monica Review (SMR), SMC’s esteemed national literary arts journal. Published twice yearly, the Review showcases the work of established authors alongside emerging writers, with a focus on narratives of the West Coast. The journal is the only nationally distributed literary magazine published by a U.S. community college.

To celebrate the fall 2024 edition, an issue launch party featuring Review author readings will be held at Santa Monica College. The party — “Santa Monica Review Presents...A Celebration of the Fall 2024 Issue with Readings by Recent Contributors” — will be held from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 6, in The Edye at the SMC Performing Arts Center, 1310 11th Street (at Santa Monica Boulevard), SantaMonica.

Tickets for the launch party — available at smc.edu/tickets — cost a suggested donation of $10. Refreshments will be served. Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center will have a variety of author titles available for purchase at the party. Abundant free parking available on premises. Seating is on a first-arrival basis.

The celebration, to be introduced by Review editor and emcee Andrew Tonkovich, features a special welcome by acclaimed writer, reviewer, and editor David Ulin (Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles) and readings by four contributors to the current issue: Ismet Prcic, Monona Wali, Alisa Slaughter, and Michelle Latiolais.

The fall 2024 issue — edited by Tonkovich, also host of the weekly show Bibliocracy Radio on KPFK (90.7 FM) — features cover art by celebrated multi-form artist elin O'Hara slavick. The issue includes 13 original short stories and essays, most by West Coast writers.

The issue opens with a Trump-era family story of love, betrayal, and hope from acclaimed author Alice Mattison (Conscience, The Kite and the String). Short story writer Daniel Davis-Williams considers the tragi-comic perils of raising a child to be autonomous, literate, and free.Josef Kuhn tells the tale of a naughty teacher who introduces students to the Dark Web. Thomas Heise (Moth; or how I came to be with you again) constructs a lyrical youthful remembrance of beauty, empire, vulnerability, and, finally, power. Writers Reid Sharpless and Ben Roth deliver much-appreciated absurdist meditations on resistance and imagination, one based on a Situationist dérive by an alienated academic, and the other a time-travel political romp through history and geography set on a Civil War battlefield that is now a golf course. Korey Lewis explores estrangement and reconciliation via an absent mother and a devoted sibling in a richly told coming-of-age story. Finally, novelist Ismet Prcic (Unspeakable Home) shares a wildly Kafkaesque auto-fiction dispatch from the streets of Portland, an irreverent, if genuine, call to empathy, and an unlikely portrait of resilience.

The issue also features nonfiction from frequent SMR contributors Christopher Buckley (One Sky to the Next), Alisa Slaughter (Bad Habitats), and memoir excerpts from poet and editor Daniel Lawless (I Tell You This Now). Other returning writers include novelists Monona Wali (Sutra Americana) and Michelle Latiolais (She). Their topics include youthful good luck, ecosystem destruction, resonant generational memories, the legacy of the India-Pakistan partition, and the limits of imagination and courage in higher education politics.

“Much of the writing plays with voice, persona, and identity,” says Tonkovich, “purposefully confusing elements of both fiction and nonfiction. These writers seem to be experimenting with ways to tell their stories — our stories — and see hybrid formal expression as an urgent, necessary, and even helpful response to civic, cultural, and political crises.”

Tonkovich adds, “This issue confronts so much societal and institutional challenge, from imperialism and ecological disaster to administrative and technological breakdown. There’s a lot of truth-telling and gestures toward witness and problem-solving, artfully composed, and with humor and sophistication. And our cover, a collage by a singularly politically engaged artist, with a hand holding a human skull, shows, starkly, ironically, the stubborn care being taken for our world, our species.”

Santa Monica Review was founded by novelist and SMC English instructor Jim Krusoe (The Sleep Garden), the Review has presented readers experimental, thoughtful, and funny original writing — including essays and short stories by Venita Blackburn, Katharine Haake, Gary Soto, and Janice Shapiro — in more than 35 years of publication, and is a celebrated national magazine. Recent stand-out work from the Review appears in the annual Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, and PEN/O. Henry anthologies.

Santa Monica Review is sold online at the Review website (smc.edu/sm_review), and in print editions at the SMC Campus Store, atBeyond Baroque and Small World Books in Venice, and at other area booksellers. Copies may also be ordered by mail. Details are available at smc.edu/sm_review. The publication costs $14 per issue or $25 for the two issues each year. More information is available at the SantaMonica Review website (smc.edu/sm_review) or by calling 949-235-8193. All events subject to change or cancellation without notice.

Santa Monica Review is a project of Santa Monica College, part of its mission to promote literacy and engagement with the literary arts in Southern California. Santa Monica College is a California Community College accredited by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC).

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