[{"id":275503,"date":"2026-08-11T15:06:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T19:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275503"},"modified":"2026-08-12T05:21:27","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T09:21:27","slug":"a-wealthy-donor-to-my-university-just-silenced-one-of-the-worlds-leading-scholars-of-genocide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/a-wealthy-donor-to-my-university-just-silenced-one-of-the-worlds-leading-scholars-of-genocide\/","title":{"rendered":"A Wealthy Donor to My University Just Silenced One of the World\u2019s Leading Scholars of Genocide"},"content":{"rendered":"

July 2026 was the deadliest month of the last year for Palestinians. The Gaza Health Ministry reported that 152 Palestinians were murdered by Israel, bringing the official death toll in the American-backed Israeli genocide to more than 73,000 people in less than three years. The UN reported in June that 20,000 of those people were children<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In spite of these horrific numbers, on August 1 the Atlantic City Press <\/i>(my local paper) reported<\/a> that John F. Scarpa, a so-called \u201cmajor donor\u201d to Stockton University, where I have taught since 2010, had complained to Stockton\u2019s president, Joe Bertolino, that Stockton\u2019s webpage for its master\u2019s program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies contained \u201cmisinformation:\u201d \u201cThe\u2026 \u2018About the Program\u2019 page\u2026 states that \u2018Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza since October 2023 has killed, according to official figures, more than 70,000 Palestinians, including over 20,000 children, leaving almost the entire population of 2.3 million people forcibly displaced.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Scarpa\u2014who made his fortune in the cell phone and cable tv industries\u2014asserted that the genocide in Gaza is \u201ca matter of significant legal, political, and scholarly dispute,\u201d that the page\u2019s language about the Israeli genocide \u201cappears to be the personal views of one individual who has previously expressed similar positions and\u2026 should not be given a platform to spread opinion as fact.\u201d This last was a transparent dig at my colleague Raz Segal, the author of text in question, and one of the leading Holocaust and genocide scholars in the world, who has been publicly harassed since calling the crisis in Gaza \u201ca textbook case of genocide\u201d in late October 2023<\/a>. As a result of Scarpa\u2019s letter, the Press <\/i>reported, Stockton\u2019s University Relations and Marketing office would be \u201c\u2018reviewing the webpage and the concerns raised, including how content across different areas of the university is presented, attributed and reviewed.\u2019\u201d The following day, Stockton erased Raz\u2019s words from its website.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I thought the writing of this would be straightforward, but I\u2019m finding it hard. I initially wrote that \u201cleadership at Stockton removed Raz\u2019s words from its website,\u201d but for style purposes, changed the wording to \u201cStockton,\u201d as though a cluster of modern buildings standing in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey is a magical entity capable of making editorial changes on its own. This is the perennial problem of writing about an institution, but I want my reader to know who is responsible for this erasure of mass murder\u2014President Bertolino, Provost Palladino, the people in charge.<\/p>\n

For two years we have watched as places like Harvard, Columbia, and Cornell caved to the Biden and Trump administrations\u2019 mafia-style demands.<\/p>\n

Provost Palladino sent a cookie-cutter email to those of us who had written in outrage at the removal of Raz\u2019s words. The email was a series of quasi-fascist corporate lies. Removing the language about Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza from the webpage did not, the provost wrote, violate Raz\u2019s academic freedom, because academic freedom has nothing to do with \u201cpublic facing\u201d materials like the university website. It only applies to scholarship and the classroom. And anyway, he concluded, the university was already in the process of homogenizing its website, and although the master\u2019s program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies was not initially part of that redesign, this was a prudent opportunity to remove \u201cpersonal statements\u201d from the website.<\/p>\n

I wrote \u201che concluded,\u201d but here\u2019s the thing: when a university higher-up writes to you, you can\u2019t be sure who\u2019s behind the message. There is a labyrinth of assistants who could have done the job and, from what I can tell, the president (or someone on his behalf) uses artificial intelligence to directly compose or dramatically edit his emails to all of us, so the words we read from the man in charge of our livelihood (to say nothing of the moral and intellectual care of his thousands of students), are machine-generated. In other words, I don\u2019t want to put words in the provost\u2019s mouth, even if he did sign the email. It\u2019s words, in the end, that all of this is concerned with, language and its erasure, its subjectivity. In Scarpa\u2019s letter to President Bertolino (which I am sure he wrote; it\u2019s riddled with errors), he reminded Raz Segal \u201cthat official university communications should reflect scholarly objectivity\u2026\u201d.<\/p>\n

Objectivity<\/i> is the great byword of higher education, that by which you prove your capitalist credentials. Stand too close to something and you\u2019re said to be unable to see it clearly, even if the thing in question is blowing up in front of your face. Show me the data, <\/i>says every university administrator I have ever met, but the data is somehow suddenly moot when it\u2019s 73,000 dead Palestinians and counting. As our local language squabble was unfolding last weekend, I listened to an interview with the British-Palestinian doctor Ghassan Abu-Sittah<\/a> about the concept of liberatory medicine. \u201cHow do you develop consciousness when your academic institutions are kowtowing to a colonial tune?\u201d he was asked. \u201cPeople are subjective,\u201d he replied. \u201cCapitalism works by objectifying the subject\u2026 and colonial wounding aims at objectifying the subjective by mutilating it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He meant this literally\u2014Palestinian bodies, Lebanese bodies, Iranian bodies as objects identified for destruction by American-made bombs\u2014but consciousness can also be mutilated. Anything I write about Gaza I write with an urgency and shame fueled by the constant reminder that I have little but language at my disposal. My body, my colleagues\u2019 bodies, those of our students are safe from mutilation, but our consciousness is available for the capitalist objectification Mr. Scarpa demands and to which our university kowtowed. If we name our sorrow about Gaza, we make ourselves into subjects and become the thing higher education abhors. But if we describe the genocide with objective facts, those facts are mutilated by the university in all its collective power, the place we thought of as our academic home.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have some questions about YOUR NUMBERS,<\/i>\u201d a racist colleague repeatedly yelled at the anthropologist and pro-Palestine activist Maura Finkelstein<\/a> when she spoke at Stockton in the fall of 2024. Maura had quoted statistics from a Lancet <\/i>article about the death toll in Gaza<\/a>, one she had not written. The numbers were objectively not hers, and yet her insistence on saying them aloud and in great pain as a genocide unfolded in front of her eyes sapped them, in that moment, of objectivity and authority, of the academic authority and freedom which are the alleged foundations of the university where we have made our home. I could say we are homeless, then, those of us who insist on naming the genocide in Gaza publicly, no matter the consequences. But the same horror and shame that animates my public speech about Palestine refuses me the right to use the word homeless <\/i>metaphorically since, as Raz Segal wrote in his statement, now erased from Stockton\u2019s website, \u201c2.3 million Gazans have been forcibly displaced,\u201d living in tents among the rubble of what was once their homes, freezing, drowning, and starving to death. And all I can do is write about it.<\/p>\n

Stockton\u2019s eager capitulation to John Scarpa\u2019s demands make the thing we already suspected objectively clear: it is not academic authority, but authoritarianism, that upholds Stockton University. For two years we have watched as places like Harvard, Columbia, and Cornell caved to the Biden and Trump administrations\u2019 mafia-style demands, thinking Stockton was somehow different. We know better, now. And we\u2019ll fight back, using all the facts and language and solidarity at our disposal. I have to believe we will win, but I would fight even with the certainty that we would lose. It\u2019s the least I can do from my safe little perch in America, where my language and my livelihood, but never my life, can be lost in this fight.<\/p>\n

And Free Palestine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

July 2026 was the deadliest month of the last year for Palestinians. The Gaza Health Ministry reported that 152 Palestinians were murdered by Israel, bringing the official death toll in the American-backed Israeli genocide to more than 73,000 people in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1793,"featured_media":275547,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43095],"tags":[94766,29302,13600,8632,23022,111699,1210,111708,77552,23001],"class_list":["post-275503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-politics","tag-academic-freedom","tag-emily-van-duyne","tag-freedom-of-speech","tag-gaza","tag-higher-education","tag-john-scarpa","tag-palestine","tag-raz-segal","tag-stockton-university","tag-universities"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19FB","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/gaza.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1793"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275434,"date":"2026-08-11T12:17:39","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T16:17:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275434"},"modified":"2026-08-11T12:17:39","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T16:17:39","slug":"this-interactive-atlas-captures-more-than-a-thousand-literary-journeys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/this-interactive-atlas-captures-more-than-a-thousand-literary-journeys\/","title":{"rendered":"This interactive atlas captures more than a thousand literary journeys."},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you ever wondered how long those nice people were actually stranded on the Orient Express? Or speculated about the carriage distance from London to Longbourn? Well, dear reader, have I got a tip for you.<\/p>\n

Reading Maps<\/a>\u00a0is home to an interactive database where curious readers can explore\u2014if not recreate\u2014famous journeys from literature.<\/p>\n

These trips are classified by mode (overland, sea) and type (survival, exile, coming of age). There are road trips represented, like that in Dave Eggers’ Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius<\/em><\/a>. But also multi-country emigration tales, as in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

This project is the brainchild of Aires Loutsaris\u2014UK-based SEO consultant by day, whimsical cartographer by night. Loutsaris has spent the past few years building his free interactive atlas, which includes both intercontinental epics (see: Moby Dick<\/em><\/a>) and local meanders like Mrs. Dalloway<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

He and his site developer Fabio Moreira were inspired by a craving for stakes that transcend the page.<\/p>\n

“Odysseus crossed a real sea. The Pequod sailed real water. Phileas Fogg’s eighty days ran on real railways,” Loutsaris writes on the site of his inspiration. “However when you read a book, all that geography stays locked in your head. Once you close the cover, it goes with it.”<\/p>\n

Enter Reading Maps, a highly bespoke piece of fan service. On the site, readers can request a route from their favorite novel (or film!), and the team will set to work making it real<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Process-wise, the map-making begins in the close read. Loutsaris initially goes into a text with an eye to stations and sequence, then checks his speculative coordinates against existing hi-res maps.<\/p>\n

Where a novel’s setting is invented (see: Calvino’s Invisible Cities<\/em><\/a>), he has a system. He anchors a hypothetical locale to “the nearest real location” and makes an editorial note in the key.<\/p>\n

But this modern Daedalus is highly open to collaboration. He relies on readers to catch errors and offer sites of expansion\u2014as several did for his map of Hemingway’s Moveable Feast<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Why maps? It’s true that a visual aid can scratch an itch, especially for anyone nostalgic for the illustrations at the front of our favorite epics. But beyond the flair factor, maps can provide a sense of scale that’s sometimes hard to grasp on the page.<\/p>\n

How long, after all, is Huck’s<\/em> Mississippi River<\/a>? (875 kilometers, it turns out!) And after goofing around with the interactive feature<\/a>, I can report it does something for my sense of plot architecture, being able to see<\/em> how many miles separate Cairo and Memphis.<\/p>\n

A map can also shed light on different character motivations.<\/p>\n

It’s one thing to experience Jonathan Harker’s lengthy coach ride<\/a> to Dracula’s castle. But seeing how the Count traveled the same journey from the Borgo Pass to Exeter by sea<\/em> sharpens the contrast between these characters, and hints at the undead man’s indomitability.<\/p>\n

For his part, Loutsaris is excited about the big picture ramifications.<\/p>\n

“The aggregate view is the interesting part,” he told me, via email.\u00a0 “You can see where the canon clusters\u2014the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic, the Silk Road\u2014and the vast regions fiction has barely touched.” Which is of course all the more case for getting those requests in.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Though Reading Maps does have a slight canonic bias\u2014The Odyssey<\/em> has been the most requested “by a long shot,” Loutsaris told me\u2014the site’s charm lies in its open door policy. Nothing is too strange or specific to get plotted.<\/p>\n

Loutsaris’ own personal favorite map comes from a 1970s maritime adventure: Bernard Moitessier’s The Long Way<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

“He was winning the first solo non stop race around the world in 1969 and he kept going instead\u2014past the finish, round the Cape of Good Hope a second time and then on to Tahiti,” the cartographer told me. “On the map you see him simply not turn north. The shape is the whole argument of the book in my opinion.”<\/p>\n

Talk about the real thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have you ever wondered how long those nice people were actually stranded on the Orient Express? Or speculated about the carriage distance from London to Longbourn? Well, dear reader, have I got a tip for you. Reading Maps\u00a0is home to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17066,"featured_media":275539,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43096,43099,43101,43231,43445,43646,43104],"tags":[63626,19596,32575,91900,6059,17937,5319,48273,23656,111703,111704],"class_list":["post-275434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art-and-photography","category-design-newsandculture","category-history","category-nature","category-technology","category-the-hub","category-travel","tag-curiosity","tag-epic","tag-invisible-cities","tag-journey","tag-literary-maps","tag-maps","tag-moby-dick","tag-nice-things","tag-odyssey","tag-reading-maps","tag-the-long-way","book-70","book-a-heartbreaking-work-of-staggering-genius","book-dracula","book-homegoing","book-invisible-cities","book-moby-dick","book-moveable-feast","book-mrs-dalloway","book-pride-and-prejudice","book-the-adventures-of-huckleberry-finn","book-the-long-way","book-the-odyssey"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Eu","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Untitled-design-18.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17066"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275434\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275530,"date":"2026-08-11T09:06:03","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T13:06:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275530"},"modified":"2026-08-11T09:06:03","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T13:06:03","slug":"c-j-bartunek-on-the-georgia-reviews-winter-2001-spring-2002-restrospective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/c-j-bartunek-on-the-georgia-reviews-winter-2001-spring-2002-restrospective\/","title":{"rendered":"C.J. Bartunek on the Georgia Review<\/em>‘s Winter 2001\/Spring 2002 Restrospective"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Chillsubs writers,<\/p>\n

\u201cThe best way to get published in a journal is to familiarize yourself with the journal first.\u201d The Georgia Review<\/em>\u2019s Winter 2001 \/ Spring 2002 is an opportunity to REALLY familiarize yourself with GR<\/em>\u2019s legacy of publishing compelling nonfiction\u2014the issue is a retrospective of essays spanning 1947 to 1996. This issue gives a sense of the vibrant history of literary journals in the twentieth century, which continues to inform literary publishing today, even as many journals now appear online rather than in print. Then-editor T. R. Hummer\u2019s introduction explores how GR\u2019s approach to nonfiction evolved and how he understands the special challenges and opportunities of the essay.<\/p>\n

As the issue shows, GR published some of the most respected authors of the latter half of the twentieth century\u2014Ernest J. Gaines, Joyce Carol Oates, Naomi Shihab Nye, Barry Lopez, Donald Barthelme, and more. Some of the earlier essays included, especially those more academic in tone, seem more obviously of another time and sensibility. Others, like Louise Erdrich\u2019s \u201cSkunk Dreams,\u201d still feel contemporary. Some authors reflect on the writing life\u2014Raymond Carver remembers his college creative writing professor John Gardner (now best known for The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers<\/em>), while Eudora Welty recalls her very first published short story, which was also the first she ever submitted. She had asked a poet who lived in her neighborhood to suggest where to send it. Manuscript, a \u201clittle magazine\u201d published out of Athens, Ohio, by a pair of editors married to each other, welcomed pieces by new writers and enthusiastically accepted \u201cDeath of a Traveling Salesman.\u201d<\/p>\n

This issue of The Georgia Review<\/em> is heavy on famous names, but while there is much to learn
\nabout craft from these authors, we too are excited to see work by newcomers, and to occasionally have the honor of featuring an author\u2019s debut publication. The next two issues we\u2019ll send as part of the Chillsubs collaboration will give you a better sense of what we\u2019ve been publishing more recently. You can also browse selections from recent issues for free at thegeorgiareview.com<\/a> if you\u2019re wondering whether we\u2019re a good fit for your work. We also post on Instagram: @georgiareview<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Hope you enjoy the issue!<\/p>\n

Sincerely,
\nC.J. Bartunek
\nManaging Editor and Nonfiction Editor
\nThe Georgia Review<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear Chillsubs writers, \u201cThe best way to get published in a journal is to familiarize yourself with the journal first.\u201d The Georgia Review\u2019s Winter 2001 \/ Spring 2002 is an opportunity to REALLY familiarize yourself with GR\u2019s legacy of publishing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19G2","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275530\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275531,"date":"2026-08-11T09:04:54","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T13:04:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275531"},"modified":"2026-08-11T09:05:37","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T13:05:37","slug":"amy-bonnaffons-on-the-georgia-reviewsspring-2024-issue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/amy-bonnaffons-on-the-georgia-reviewsspring-2024-issue\/","title":{"rendered":"Amy Bonnaffons on the Georgia Review<\/em>‘s Spring 2024 Issue"},"content":{"rendered":"

October 2025<\/p>\n

Dear Chillsubs writers,<\/p>\n

I hope you enjoyed your first back issue! This time we\u2019re sharing our issue from Spring 2024, which features fiction by Munachim Amah, Ren\u00e9e Hayek, Lilia Shrayfer, Nicole Haroutunian, and Kathy Chao\u2014as well as a special comic feature and some fantastic poetry, essays, and reviews.<\/p>\n

Shrayfer\u2019s story, \u201cA Man Without a Burial,\u201d is a debut publication\u2014something we get very excited about here at GR<\/em>. We take seriously our mission to \u201csupport writers at every stage of their careers\u201d; while we are highly selective (we get about 10,000 submissions a year and can only publish a handful of those), many stories we pull out of the Submittable queue to discuss in our editorial meetings are by emerging or even debut authors. About 25% of the stories I\u2019ve advocated for in acquisition meetings have been debuts, several of those by writers without MFAs. This is partly possible because most of the work we publish goes through at least one round of editorial exchange; this means we often work with the writer on revisions (sometimes quite significant ones) before publication. We believe our writers deserve the gift of a careful reader who pays serious attention to their work and helps them realize its full potential. We\u2019re able to engage in this kind of old-fashioned editorial practice because we are well supported by the University of Georgia (many lit mags are staffed by volunteers engaged in labors of love; we do love our labor but we also, blessedly, earn salaries.) I often tell potential submitters to keep this in mind: if we love a piece, we\u2019re willing to work with the author to get it just right. So while we do want your best and most polished work, we\u2019re especially excited by work that takes big swings, that feels alive and full of potential.<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t at GR<\/em> when Shrayfer\u2019s story was acquired, but reading it, I\u2019m entranced not only by the window it provides into the Bukharan Jewish community and the provocative way it deals with identity and gender, but also by the aesthetic risks it takes. The plot\u2019s dreamlike logic would confound many a workshop\u2014yet somehow this craft choice enables Shrayfer to elegantly capture the way in which memory and desire collapse into each other.<\/p>\n

Chao\u2019s story, \u201cOne of You Will Betray Me,\u201d has such wonderful humor and specificity; it went through the editorial exchange process here and went on to win a Pushcart. I also appreciate the heartbreaking lyricism of Amah\u2019s story, the skillful illumination of family dynamics in Hayek\u2019s, and the way Haroutunian\u2019s dramatizes a young woman\u2019s consciousness coming into focus. This issue makes clear just how diverse GR<\/em> stories can be\u2014aesthetically, geographically, and in many other ways. Each one speaks with precision from its own specific context, while also offering something valuable to the general reader.<\/p>\n

Happy reading!<\/p>\n

Warmly,<\/p>\n

Amy Bonnaffons
\nInterim Fiction Editor<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

October 2025 Dear Chillsubs writers, I hope you enjoyed your first back issue! This time we\u2019re sharing our issue from Spring 2024, which features fiction by Munachim Amah, Ren\u00e9e Hayek, Lilia Shrayfer, Nicole Haroutunian, and Kathy Chao\u2014as well as a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19G3","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275531\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275529,"date":"2026-08-11T09:03:58","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T13:03:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275529"},"modified":"2026-08-11T09:03:58","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T13:03:58","slug":"noah-baldino-on-the-georgia-reviews-spring-2024-issue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/noah-baldino-on-the-georgia-reviews-spring-2024-issue\/","title":{"rendered":"Noah Baldino on the Georgia Review<\/em>‘s Spring 2024 Issue"},"content":{"rendered":"

October 2025<\/p>\n

Dear Chill Subs Writers\u2014<\/p>\n

To be a magazine that truly represents the full stock of literary imagination means valuing emerging writers as much as established ones. The Georgia Review<\/em> takes this stewardship seriously: in the Spring 2024 issue, for example, emerging poets account for nearly half of the poetry section. As an editor, the only thing more thrilling than scrolling the submission queue and spotting the name of a known literary titan is opening a submission by an unfamiliar name and encountering a literary future.<\/p>\n

How, though, amidst thousands of submissions, can an emerging writer catch an editor\u2019s attention? Having worked for over a decade in different queues, I\u2019ve found that emerging writers most distinguish themselves not through novelty or trendiness but through trust. Emerging poet Jim Whiteside\u2019s \u201cLa Dame Bleue,\u201d found in this back issue, is a meaningful example. While ekphrasis is exciting, what actually draws me to the poem is what it withholds\u2014what it trusts its reader to comprehend.<\/p>\n

\u201cLa Dame Bleue\u201d makes two invocations: to Alexander McQueen\u2019s 2008 runway show, and to the speaker\u2019s relationship with his mother. But it notably does not explicate either context. Instead, it trusts the reader, staying as understated as its ending\u2019s \u201csimple, gray dress.\u201d A less confident poet might follow the urge to make more explicit the emotional dynamic between mother and child; instead, Whiteside only suggests. The mother delivers her cancer diagnosis not face-to-face or via call, but through text. The speaker cannot restate the technical name for the mother\u2019s cancer but knows to call a high-fashion headpiece a \u201cfascinator.\u201d To an attentive reader, that\u2019s plenty to work with. Likewise, a less trusting writer might let the poem be dominated by the McQueen show\u2019s lore: it was a tribute to Isabella Blow, the woman who discovered him and who, finding herself eventually alienated from McQueen and the fashion community at-large, took her own life. She was buried in his clothes. As with the best ekphrasis, one can import meaning without knowing these details. But for those who do know, the poem becomes suffused with tension, McQueen and Blow urgent foils to speaker and mother. Then, the restraint that clothes the poem comes into clarity: what Whiteside has made is not a poem about McQueen\u2019s show, nor a poem about his mother\u2019s cancer, but a poem about detachment and its consequence. By resisting the impulse to make the poem\u2019s contexts its content, Whiteside releases the poem, and its reader, to discovery.<\/p>\n

Across this issue\u2019s emerging and established poets, you\u2019ll find various approaches to contextual restraint as a kind of trust. Arro Mandell uses the context of eviction to explore ecological intimacy; in deciding not to detail her uncle\u2019s titular suffering, Marianne Boruch makes a poem that can instead hold the complexity of legacy. What\u2019s kept on a poem\u2019s edge speaks, I think, to discernment\u2014a quality crucial to both a writer and editor.<\/p>\n

\u2014Noah Baldino
\nEditor, Poetry and Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

October 2025 Dear Chill Subs Writers\u2014 To be a magazine that truly represents the full stock of literary imagination means valuing emerging writers as much as established ones. The Georgia Review takes this stewardship seriously: in the Spring 2024 issue,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19G1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275529\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275498,"date":"2026-08-11T06:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T10:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275498"},"modified":"2026-08-10T16:28:52","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T20:28:52","slug":"lit-hub-daily-august-11-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/lit-hub-daily-august-11-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Hub Daily: August 11, 2026"},"content":{"rendered":" TODAY: In 1937, Edith Wharton dies. <\/span>\n