Latest Issue of Conjunctions Explores Absence

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.– Conjunctions:60, In Absentia—the latest issue of the innovative literary magazine published by Bard College—gathers a collection of today’s leading contemporary writers to explore the presence of absence, the losses that gain on us, the black holes in our everyday lives. Edited by Conjunctions editor, novelist, and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow, this will be an issue of missing persons, phantom limbs, sensory deprivation, amnesia, lost masterpieces, broken artifacts, islands that sink under the skin of the sea. In Absentia features new fiction, essays, and poetry from, among others, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Olen Butler, Maxine Chernoff, Robert Coover, Ann Lauterbach, Charles Bernstein, Frederic Tuten, Brian Evenson, and Can Xue, as well as three previously untranslated “dramolets” by Robert Walser (translated from German by Daniele Pantano and James Reidel).

“What we have assembled here is a literary compendium about the presence of absence,” writes Morrow. “From Joyce Carol Oates’s story of a young protagonist whose devotion to working with bonobos at a zoo leads him on a journey far beyond the normal districts of primatology to Karen Hays’s essay on a wide spectrum of subjects—not the least of which is the metaphysics of the fourth dimension—these works attempt to observe the unobservable, to see what isn’t quite there.”

In addition to the writers mentioned above, In Absentia also features new work from Matt Bell, Gabriel Blackwell, Kim Chinquee, Gillian Conoley, Julia Elliott, Benjamin Hale, Karen Hays, Lucy Ives, Brandon Krieg, Carole Maso, John Madera, J. W. McCormack, Miranda Mellis, Yannick Murphy, Stephen O’Connor, Joanna Ruocco, Joanna Scott, Marjorie Welish, and Justin Wymer.