Latest Issue of Celebrated Literary Magazine Conjunctions Gathers Leading Writers to Explore the Question: Who or What Is an Alien?
 

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.– Who or what is an alien? Someone or something whose profound otherness stirs in us terror, even dread, or perhaps a healthy—sometimes dangerous—curiosity? Exploring these straightforward yet complex questions, Conjunctions:67, Other Aliens—the latest issue of the innovative literary magazine published by Bard College—collects works of literary science and speculative fiction that explore the vast precincts of unfamiliarity, of keen difference, of weirdness and not belonging. Edited by Conjunctions editor, novelist, and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow and novelist Elizabeth Hand, Other Aliens features a historic selection of letters from James Tiptree Jr. to Joanna Russ, as well as interviews with Kelly Link by Elizabeth Hand and with Samuel R. Delany by Brian Evenson, and a conversation between John Crowley and John Clute. Other highlights include new work from Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Park, Peter Straub, Jeffrey Ford, James Morrow, Julia Elliott, Valerie Martin, Leena Krohn (trans. Eva Buchwald), and Lavie Tidhar, among other leading contemporary writers.
 
“In these glimpses into the writerly mind, as in all the imaginative worlds this issue contains, we pursue a definition of the indefinable,” write Morrow and Hand. “Aliens are, by definition, Other. They are the stuff of science and speculative fiction, of fantastika and fantasy, yes, but they are also traditional literary figures whom society, however unfairly, has labeled pariahs, misfits, nonpersons, the Ishmaels of the world. When Frankenstein’s monster stalks the countryside, a threatening, ill-fated product of human genius and hubris, he is the alien, the Other. But those who misjudge him and seek his destruction are also the Others in Shelley’s story.”
 
Additional contributors to Other Aliens include Matthew Baker, Madeline Bourque Kearin, Michael Parrish Lee, Jean Muno (trans. Edward Gauvin), Jessica Reed, Laura Sims, S. P. Tenhoff, Jonathan Thirkield, and E. G. Willy.