THE ARCHIVES

Volume 2.5:
No Theme
10.21.2007

We offer a variety of pieces in this long-awaited issue: F. John Sharp tells a story about a radio host and his libido in High Fidelity; our friend Girija Tropp inaugurates our special flash fiction department with Three Flash Fictions, and we are pleased to present a wonderful photo gallery, A Long Road Trip Indeed, from JP Rodriguez.

Volume 2.4:
Thoroughly and Persistently Happy
08.25.2007

Last week the fog lifted (a fog both metaphoric and literal), and I took every opportunity to put myself in the sun — whatever work I could do outside, I did do outside — and our title describes the mood I've been in as well as the character of this issue. This month's fiction, They'll Be Happy to Hear That, is by Bruce Holland Rogers, and we thank him for providing such an apt title. Our poem is Nine Ways of Looking at a Spoon by Tracie McBride; if that doesn't remind you of anything, I'll just say that Wallace Stevens is probably amused, wherever he is. And finally, anybody who is thoroughly and persistently annoyed by the profound inanity of the questions answered by Randy Cohen every week in the New York Times Magazine, Gail Louise Siegel submits her own set of Letters to the Ethicist. For Hadley's sake, Mr. Cohen, ANSWER ALREADY!

Volume 2.3:
The Failing Sun
07.25.2007

The sun may be blazing over most of North America at the moment, but here on the western side of San Francisco, things seem a little different: nearly every day these past two weeks has been various degrees of foggy, windy, and cold. And perhaps that's the reason I have chosen the pieces in this update: for me they all evoke an atmosphere of cold weather and great distances. Jason W. Selby offers us two poems, one of which is a villanelle — my weakness, lately. Next is a story composed of one man's reflections on the way to an unexpected funeral: Father, Brother, Nephew, Son by Brian G. Ross. And our third offering is Shoreline Farms, a gallery by Michael Stutz. As he wrote to me, "With these I aim to capture atmospheric images of a lost America from the window of a speeding automobile. They use sun and shadow to give texture and depth (like a photographic diorama), and were taken in rural northwest Ohio, in the flat farmland that runs along Lake Erie. Each of these photos was taken close to the shoreline — just a mile or so from the water's edge."

Volume 2.2:
In Our Flesh
07.10.2007

The prose works in this update are concerned with women's body image, and some instances in which this is influenced for the worse by the surrounding culture. In her essay Measurements, Mollie Hicok remembers a summer spent working at a Victoria's Secret in the mall, and reflects upon a corporate culture as intent upon selling an image of femininity as it is upon selling undergarments. Shame, by Shubha Venugopal, is a story about a teenage girl and the insidious effect that isolation — isolation by reason of her background, her skin color, and her burgeoning sexuality — has upon her. And finally we present four poems by Carol Frith. Although largely unrelated to the themes of our prose, they are no less ravishing, and my favorite (Vacancies) has lent an apt title to this offering. Happy reading!

Volume 2.1:
Gambara Lives!
03.26.2007

It has been a little over five months since our last issue, and during that time we have crafted a new editorial policy that will allow us to present much more of the kind of work that GAMBARA has come to be known for. And we have quite a number of exciting pieces lined up for the months ahead. To lead off, we present Kuzhali Manickavel's story of two women and a man — and the man's mouse, Miraculous. Next up is Paul Alan Fahey's memoir of the Peace Corps, Send Your Camel to Bed. In our poetry section, we bring you Apoptosis and Postcards to Myself by Jennifer Armentrout. And finally, in our art section we present Terese Mörtvik's gallery, Nordic Solitude.

Volume 1.5:
Love Thwarted, Love Found
10.07.2006

It always surprises me when a hidden theme emerges from the pieces I select for a given issue, as if it were guiding my selections all along. As we got this issue ready for publication, it became clear that the common thread was the theme of love, whether it be love thwarted or love found. Carrie Hoffman's vignette, Let's Talk, presents a little of both, in a scene that could either be near the beginning or near the end of an affair. Debra Wierenga, in a masterful sonnet about a famous couple, reveals Barbie's Story. The themes of love and oblivion are integral to Gina Berriault's virtually unknown final novel, as Jeremy Hatch shows in his essay, Against Oblivion. And finally, our gallery of photographs now has a portfolio from Ily Goldfinger, documenting her ongoing love affair with her adopted home, Dubai City.

Volume 1.4: Reading the World
7.25.2006

One of the most surprising things about this magazine has been the international nature of the enterprise. This begins with the name, which is in part a reference to the 19th-century novella by Balzac — a story about love, ambition, and the madness of art — and although Balzac's Paris is probably the most far-flung locale represented in these pages, we have also been lucky to present work from people living all over the contemporary globe: the United States & Canada, of course, but also Iraq, Brazil, China, Italy, & Australia — and for the 2007 print issue, you can add Scotland, India and New Zealand to that list. From time to time magazines run an International Issue as a special theme, but it seems that, at Gambara, every issue is the International Issue, without our exactly setting out to do that. It's just the nature of the enterprise.

This particular issue, the fourth of six for this year, is as international as most. Today we present two short pieces by Girija Tropp, an Australian who recently won her country's prestigious Josephine Ulrick Literature Award — and you may look forward to seeing more of Girija's awesome work in our first print issue, slated for the spring of 2007. We also have two poems from the charming Davide Trame — a Venetian who has been writing poetry exclusively in English for the past thirteen years. Viva Venezia! Jeremy Hatch (of the Republic of California) presents a review in which he discusses at length a segment of the principal work of Ved Mehta (an exemplary international figure himself), and argues strongly for the re-publication of those volumes from this work which have sadly fallen out of print. And we are pleased to present a folio of pictures taken in Ozark, Alabama by O'neil De Noux, a native New Orleanian who first made his mark in hard-boiled mystery writing.

Volume 1.3: Shamelessly Exploiting the Sesquipedalian
5.8.2006

Welcome back for the long-awaited third installment of Gambara. This time around, we offer you Drawing Light, a short story from Avital Gad-Cykman; three poems from Charles Schubert; our review series continues as Niranjana Iyer, in Re-imagining the Mundane, explains how Diane Schoemperlen does exactly that in her sui generis work, Forms of Devotion; and finally, Roy Kesey presents Cheese, a sobering meditation upon the fateful intersection of heresy and lactose-containing foodstuffs during the salad days of the Inquisition.

Volume 1.2: Encore, S'il Vous Plaît
3.13.2006

Welcome back to Gambara, and thank you one and all for your interest in our new project, your signups to the newsletter, and your submissions! In this month's installment, Kim Chinquee offers us two short fictions, Pole and We Got Reservations, and Debra Brenegan contributes two poems, Tracy and Collapse. Our review series continues with Literary Machines: Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages, in which Jeremy Hatch introduces us to the world of Interactive Fiction. And finally, don't miss our second gallery, a stunning set of images of Iraq from Benjamin Buchholz.

Volume 1.1: Your Balm for the Fantods
1.22.2006

The months leading up to our first issue have been both exciting and uncertain at times — sometimes very uncertain, as in "who are we to be publishing a magazine?" — therefore, we are not only proud to present our first sampler of entertainments and artworks, we are doubly proud to present it more or less when we said we would. (It's a late kind of on-time, but still on-time.) In this edition, Joshua Pastor contributes two poems, Florence, and Old Photograph. A New Jersey girl moves to California and comes to terms with her wild hair in Unruly, by Helene Simkin Jara. Kicking off our review series of Books Unknown & Unheard-Of is Jeremy Hatch with No Future: Nani Power's Crawling at Night. And since no literary journal would be complete without a stirring memoir of the glamorous expatriate life, we tapped Davis Banta for a sneak peek at his posthumous work, Immovable Feast. Finally, we'd like to present the photography of Ginger Roettger in her first gallery with us. It's our first time, too.