After 20 years as editor of New England Review (NER), Stephen Donadio, Fulton Professor of Humanities at Middlebury College, returns to full time teaching with the publication of an extraordinary volume of Middlebury’s literary quarterly. From the poetry of Derrick AustinPaisley Rekdal, and more than a dozen others, to the memorable stories of writers such as Leslie Bazzett and Charles Baxter, the new double issue of NER presents nearly 400 pages of new writing and translations that span two centuries.

In nonfiction, Rick Barot tells of becoming a poet in the years between undergraduate and graduate school in “The Image Factory,” Steven Poole calls out deplorable office jargon in “The Favored Language of the Appararatchik: A Contemporary Sampler,” Jeff Staiger takes a long look at the impact of e-readers in ”Kindle 451,” and much more.

The new issue includes a special focus on Russia as well. With a rich offering of poetry and fiction, much of it in English for the first time, NER presents 20 translations from Russian, including major Soviet era poets and contemporary poets, stories by Russian Booker Prize winners, and works by Dostoevsky and Chekhov. There is also a reconsideration of an article written by Andrey Platonov during the Moscow Show Trials; a new, annotated translation of the transcript of the trial of poet Joseph Brodsky on the 50th anniversary of that event; an account of Lee Harvey Oswald’s pilgrimage to the USSR; Tomas Venclova’s memories of Anna Akhmatova; a detailed analysis of Andrey Tarkovsky’s film The Mirror; and playwright David Edgar’s reflections on language in eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Excerpts from the new issue are available on line:  http://www.nereview.com/volume-34-no-3-4-2014.

NER’s next issue, available in June, will be the first published under the direction of Carolyn Kuebler, who assumes the role of editor.

New England Review
Published by Middlebury College, New England Review is a nationally recognized literary journal that cultivates artistic excellence and innovation in contemporary writing and engages readers deeply in the literary arts through its quarterly publication, dynamic web presence, and quarterly public reading series.