Boone's Dock Review 1.1

Boone's Dock Press

Description

The first e-issue of Boone's Dock Review is a collection of short fiction by new talent on the literary scene, edited by Nancy Scuri. Authors in this issue include Brian Callaghan, Bobby Kvrgic, Anna Falcone, Phil Asaph and Max Wahrenburg. They're tapping in on everything from Americanization to the supernatural and leaving no stone unturned in their quest to show us all of human and superhuman nature. It's all brought to you by your friends at Boone's Dock Press, a sustainable, independent publishing house based in Amityville, New York.

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 21 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780982350096
• Langue: English

Extrait

Boone’s Dock Review
 
Volume 1: Issue 1
Summer/Fall 2011


 
 
 
Boone’s Dock Review
is published in eBook format by
Boone’s Dock Press LLC
Amityville, New York, USA
www.boonesdockpress.com
 
converted by http://www.eBookIt.com
 
Copyright 2011 Boone’s Dock Press
ISBN-13: 978-0-9823-5009-6
The publisher reserves first printing rights to all works in this issue.
Cover design © 2011, Boone’s Dock Press
 
Publisher’s Foreword

G reetings, Readers!
Thank you for setting your eyes and intellects upon the first issue of Boone’s Dock Review. We are certain that it will provide you with cognitive victuals of the highest quality, and we are further assured that your “game” will improve significantly as the direct result of being a member of the elite class of readers to whom we cater. For now, I would like to take a few paragraphs of our time to introduce you to
Boone’s Dock Press and Boone’s Dock Review .
We are a publishing company (Obvious, 2011, p.101) based in Amityville, New York. To quote our mission statement: “Boone’s Dock Press originated in a moment of pure inspiration and seeks to bring that authenticity to everything we produce and promote.” There was an overall vision involved at the outset, and this vision remains with BDP as we move forward into new ventures and, indeed, toward the new horizon in publishing and reading created by the e-book market. We remain dedicated to providing high-quality products that preserve artists’ creative concepts in sustainable formats. There is no question that our new literary review for e-readers is in keeping with our mission.
From start to finish, this review is filled with some of the best new literary work on the scene. Our authors are the “real thing” – expatriates, aficionados, movers, reformed poets, unreformed poets, professors, throwbacks, progressives and, to the last, literary artists who embrace the richness of life, living and imagination in thought, word and deed. We see their work as both timely and timeless, and these qualities are integral to great literature.
In the months and years to come, we look forward to showcasing more literary excellence in the pages of Boone’s Dock Review. Perhaps more importantly, we look forward to developing a community of readers who know that we are the “go-to” for new talent and the voice of visionary literary work. As we grow, we hope that this community will take on a life of its own, and we invite you to be a part of it at www.boonesdockpress.com , where you will find information on the goings on at Boone’s Dock, as well as links to interact with our authors and editors.
Until next season, and
Always with my Appreciation and Respect,

Kempton B. Van Hoff, Publisher
From the Editor’s Desk

A historian once told me that when George Washington became the first president of the United States, he was very mindful that he would be setting precedent for everyone who would follow him into office. The protocols for everything from the inauguration to transferring powers to the next leader was his to decide, and he knew that any changes, while possible, would be made slowly and after much thought, so he had to “get it right” the first time. He was, after all, making history.
Now, I know I’m not the leader of the free world, but as the first editor of a brand new publication, I want to get it right, too. There were many small decisions to be made in regards to cover design, fonts, layout, and all the minutiae that the reader never thinks about. There were the bigger issues: What is the title going to be? Should it be monthly or a quarterly? What sort of artwork should we include? The first question, the biggest question, had to be decided first. What kind of writing did we want to publish?
Fortunately, that was the simplest question to answer.
We at the Boone’s Dock Press want to publish the sort of fiction we love to read. Does the story engage me? Does it take me somewhere I haven’t been before? Does it show me something new every time I go back to it? Does it make me think? Is this a piece of writing that makes me want to grab the person next to me and say “You need to read this”?
It may be a simple answer, but it demands a high level of writing that isn’t easy. This issue runs the gamut: Foreign intrigue, fantasy, and contemporary fiction are all represented. It’s a strong start, and it will only get better. Thank you for joining us as Boone’s Dock Review makes some history of its own.

Nancy M. Scuri, Fiction Editor
Angel Lite, Angel Dark
Brian J Callaghan

“If you gaze long enough into the Abyss, the Abyss shall gaze back into you.”—Frederick Nietzsche
M ichal Pitrik walked out of the back wine storage door and down the three steps into his garden. It was a large garden with a lot of property. A creek ran through the middle of it, and Michal owned a small plot of land on the other side, bordering up to and onto the newly built, post-communist satellite suburban villages, where the nouveau riche and their ilk were moving to from their former communist era apartment block houses in Prague. Michal had gotten his house back when that property was nothing more than a communist era farm that the state had put up for sale. It would take the state four years to sell it. At that time, Czech developers had not yet seen any potential in building houses outside of Prague. Back then, from his garden, he could watch the sun set across a field of yellow rapeseed plants. The rapeseed stunk to the high heavens. It made his nose scratch and his breathing harsh. He hated the spring when the mustard flowers bloomed.
Of course, now he hated the new houses and their blocking of his access to the sunset more.
He was carrying in his hand a black and white marble notebook and a dossier filled with photos. There was still enough sunlight to read by, but, as it was still spring, and as there was no longer any rapeseed to mess with his nose, Michal flicked on the light that stood next to his wooden deck table and chairs. He also lit the insect repellent candles to keep the mosquitoes away. When both were done, and after he had confirmed that the wind was too weak to blow his papers away, he put the murder book and its dossier of photos down on the table, after which he went into his garden and pulled up a long straight leaf of chive and began to chew on the plant hungrily. Pulling out his knife, he cut an estimated ten more stalks, the amount he felt he would need while doing his reading. His wife, who had spent the past three years begging him to sell this property and tried daily to talk him into moving to the much more manageable small apartment block sized houses across the creek in the new satellites, utterly despised his chive chewing. Then again, she had also despised his smoking, a habit that he had only been able to relinquish via his constant chewing on the green, oniony leaves. He placed the ten chive shoots on the table and took a seat, opening the dossier first.
“Fucking gypsies,” Michal said as he looked at the victim, a gypsy woman, who had a second smile cut roughly across her neck.
Michal wasn’t a racist, even if he was a Czech police detective. Ninety percent of the police force could be defined as racist: against Asians, blacks, Ukrainians, gypsies, Jews, Muslims, and hell, even though they were an immigrant group that kept largely to themselves, the Germans, and while the population of the city kept expanding, all of these peoples and groups moving into the city by the thousands, the work of the police department kept growing, the question of who to blame easily falling onto the groups that were most often caught red-handed, they not being the Czechs. Michal’s vulgarity wasn’t directed at the race of the woman who was murdered, but at her culture, however, and if that seemed racist, it wasn’t.
The gypsies that Michal was swearing at were of a culture where they handled things themselves. They as a whole had been managing problems without the usage or the assistance of the state since their arrival on the European continent during the Dark Ages. Since then the Romany, as they were now called, the term gypsy now labeled as politically incorrect, have been sporadically attacked by Christian knights, enslaved, searched out for extermination, sent to Hitler’s concentration camps with extermination being the sole intent in mind, force-settled by the communists, and now just completely and utterly despised by the post-communist winner takes all free market. Meanwhile, the Czechs, Michal’s own people, took down their Czech signs for German during the Second World War, replaced their German books for Russian during communism, and now were bathing themselves in English, a language they desperately needed to survive in the make-or-break American business world of today. It was, Michal mused, only a hop, skip and a jump to Chinese from here, a point that bothered Michal’s racist brother cops to no end. But the gypsies somehow maintained their language, their culture and their attitude no matter who was running the show. And Michal was certain that when the Arabs, Russians and Chinese had overrun Prague and had made it their own, as the radical right was now decreeing to be the nation’s future, Michal was certain that the new leadership of the city of Prague would one day be looking at a picture just like this one and saying, ‘Fucking gypsies,’ knowing just as well as Michal himself did that their culture, the Gypsy culture, had yet again persevered and that they were once again going to handle things on their own, Michal’s job just being to predict: to who?
Michal lined up the pictures on the table in front of him, he spitting the remains of the first chive grass on the ground under his table. He picked up another one and started to chew on that one as well. This call, about the dead gypsy woman, scared Michal. The Czech Republic was no longer the land of trad