For a purported personal zine, Al Burian’s Burn Collector is strangely outward-looking. His philosophical musings on expat culture, life in Berlin, punk rock, and other topics are based on his own experiences, but they aren’t just stories. Burian raises plenty of questions without answering them, putting his reader in a position to consider these everyday ideas in a new light. His essays are a fine counterpoint to the legions of navel-gazing zinesters that populate the perzine genre in that they aren’t meant to chronicle his life, but instead connect it with larger social and existential problems.

Issue #15 is based largely around Burian’s life in Berlin, where he’d been living for one year when he wrote it. Two of his stories describe a toothache he had abroad and his slight panic at managing his health in a foreign country, while another section details the people and sights he sees on the street. Burian shows loyalty neither to his country of origin (the US) nor his adopted home; instead he looks at Berlin as a flawed but fascinating place to be. His interview with fellow expat Liam Warfield adds to this impression; Warfield tries to see Berlin as more than a tourist or artsy city by visiting non-touristy parts of town. However, both visitors worry about increasing gentrification and influx of “hipsters.”

One thoughtful essay looks at a scientific study that, for Burian, proves happiness and a realistic view of the world as essentially incompatible. Maybe it’s the idea of happiness that’s flawed, though; later, Burian writes of happiness not as an achievement but as a right way of living, or pursuit of “the good.” Neither essay gives a definitive answer, but they definitely touch on deeply held assumptions (or maybe just suspicions) that we all have. Burian makes the leap that most personal zine writers seem to attempt – to make connections between the personal and universal, and touch upon common concerns with humor and dexterity.

A fairly large section of the zine excerpts Anne Elizabeth Moore’s reflections on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the aftermath, both in Germany and abroad. Examining the use and misuse of the Berlin Wall’s legacy, and looking again at life in a partitioned city, Moore draws some surprising conclusions about socialism and radicalism. Burian’s reflection on May Day in Berlin, as a social event and staged encounter between radicals and police, fits in neatly with her essays.

In a seeming parody of the magazine format, Burian includes a “reviews” section in which he talks about a museum, famed squatting locations, his own LP collection, and more in a somewhat rambling and, again, philosophical fashion. His thoughts return again to gentrification and a seeming loss of radicalism among young people; meanwhile he wonders if he’s lost his own sense of activism and become part of what he used to rage against.

Burn Collector is sort of like sitting down with a friend for a chat, if that friend were highly analytical and interested in finding deeper meaning in seemingly mundane experiences. Burian is a good writer and thinker; he has clearly considered these essays for a long time, and he bolsters them with his own experience. If you’re looking for a perzine with punch and pathos, check out Burn Collector.

Adam Gnade

When writers or readers think of literary formats, the lowly novella is often overlooked or forgotten. Usually between 20,000 and 40,000 words, the novella occupies an awkward space between short story and novel, but it offers opportunities for characterization and conciseness that longer or shorter forms don’t. Adam Gnade writes both novellas and novels, and his shorter works stand apart as fascinating experiments in an unusual media form.

Hey Hey Lonesome and The Heat and the Hot Earth were published in 2011 and share a lot in terms of structure and characterization. Both follow a group of teens (and one older character) in Southern California as they navigate relationships and try to find their place in an amorphous social order. Lonesome follows the paths of several characters as they move toward a house party; they move between astonishingly crude and aloof dialogue and highly emotional introspection. Its characters, for the most part, balance outer cool and inner turmoil. Hot Earth is more dynamic and simpler in structure; punctuated by a longing letter and a sneering Tumblr post from two characters, it reflects the callousness and romanticism of the modern teen.

The two novellas are connected through recurring characters and themes, and Gnade notes that he ultimately wants to link these stories with his longer novel, Hymn California, and another novella. Gnade says, “The whole universe of my characters is mapped out in a little three-inch-thick notebook. It's like a geometric cube of paper. I'm just following that map until it's done.” The connectedness of the stories gives the novellas a feeling not unlike those big ensemble teen comedies of the ’80s and ’90s; characters move in and out of each other’s orbits, brushing against each other as they go.

For Gnade, his interest in novella was born of necessity and convenience, as well as attachment. He began writing novellas almost by accident: “A couple years ago I was set to do a giant two-month overseas tour, and my publisher at the time had promised that my novel Hymn California was going to be ready to take with me. It got close to the wire and they didn't have the book ready, so I pulled together some writing and printed up my first novella, Seasons Loving Nothing, on the copy machine at the house I was living in in Portland.” He went on to write three novellas in 2011, including Hey Hey Lonesome and The Heat and the Hot Earth, though he insists that was “a fluke.”

The idea of the novella is close to his heart, however. “I've always traveled a lot, and I like things I can carry with me," he says. "The pocket-size book format is great. I have a lot of smaller books I've carried with me around the world and read obsessively wherever I was — stuff that really saves your life, that you know cover to cover, and coming back to it each time is like coming in from the cold.” More than a convenience of form, the novella holds a special significance for Gnade.

Gnade’s novellas are published by Punch Drunk Press, a small press based in San Diego, California. He sees independent publishing as the smartest move for any writer more interested in creativity than profit, and he laments the idea that some writers, by depending on big media to publish them, go unpublished altogether. Independent and smaller publishers are, for Gnade, the answer to a struggling writer’s prayers: “Independent publishing has the potential to keep literature alive if writers actually go for it and opt out of the mainstream press trap. The problem is that a lot of people are too proud, and as a result, beautiful, life-changing works of fiction are wasting away, never to be read.” Getting your work published is more important than what form it eventually takes or how big the print run is, in other words.

His latest venture, a longer novel called Youth is a Wolf Dark and Golden, may not seem to be on the same wavelength as a few novellas, but the ethos behind the work certainly is. “I want to show people how it is to live in the time that I've lived,” he says of the novel, “In a way, realist fiction writers can be just as important to historical record as historians.” Both novellas – Hey Hey Lonesome and The Heat and the Hot Earth – are chock full of characters just like us. They aren’t famous or even all that objectively interesting; they talk incessantly about themselves, to others and in print, and they feel nervous about the present and future. Through their stories, Gnade asserts that these kinds of stories — our stories — are worth telling.

The personal zine or “perzine” genre is one of the most popular in independent publishing (we’ve covered a few here, like EmiTown and King-Cat). It can be hard to distinguish yourself in such a crowded field, but Alec Longstreth’s Phase 7 stands out. Published by the author since 2002, Phase 7 is a series of minicomics, most recently alternating between five-issue adventure story “Basewood” and sketchbook issues on the artist’s life. It’s personal, funny, and, incredibly, quite original.

Despite its most recent form, Phase 7 is much more than “Basewood” and even departs frequently from personal stories. As Longstreth says, “The subject matter of each issue of Phase 7 varies widely, depending on what kind of stories I want to tell. I've done auto-bio, attempts at serious fiction, humor, comics essays, stick-figure diary comics, and sketchbook issues.” Variety is the key to Longstreth’s longevity, but it also seems like the outgrowth of a natural impulse to continue experimenting and learning.

Issue #16 in particular covers Longstreth’s years in New York, struggling to make a living and forget old loves while pursuing new ones. He also includes plenty of absurd and charming interactions with New Yorkers on the subway or in parks. Random denizens of the city approach him to offer encouragement on his drawing, or simply to yell at him. We see Longstreth at work, out with friends, on dates, and in a wide variety of ways, adjusting to life in New York.

Most of Longstreth’s artwork is miniscule (the panels are usually one-inch squares); his drawing style is appropriately simple but expressive. Some of these comics are particularly rough, given the original sketchbook context, but undeniably interesting.

For Longstreth, art and cartooning is a process of evolution. His interest in experimentation comes through even in the sketchbook issue; some panels are ornate, while others are little more than scribbles, and his page format changes frequently. Longstreth says of his drawing technique, “I was doing a lot of theater work before I started making my own comics, so I definitely think about choosing a specific drawing style for each story, the same way the set, costume, and lighting designers will design a specific look and feel for each play.” His interest in playing with form is especially noticeable in a flow-chart page that shows his future; abortive options circle around each other, conveying uncertainty.

Although the sketchbook issue was apparently meant to be a placeholder when gaps between “Basewood” issues became too large (Longstreth describes them as something “quick and fun” to work on during Basewood issues), it stands on its own as a nice addition to the perzine genre. It’s impressively polished but never really lets you forget its self-published roots. Longstreth views his role as publisher as privileged, in that it allows him to preserve his own voice in a way that mass media can’t compete with. He adds, “No one makes any money self-publishing mini-comics, so it is usually done purely for the love of the art form.”

Now that he’s finished with the “Basewood” story, upcoming issues of Phase 7 will focus on the band Weezer and movies from Longstreth’s childhood. There’s a sense of play in Phase 7; new issues could be about anything, and it’s interesting to see what the author chooses next.

Liz Baudler

It seems that all we hear about these days is how much trouble the print-publishing industry is in. With many major publications moving online (or at least developing a much stronger online presence), it seems natural to worry that smaller (and less wealthy) works like zines are going to have to adapt or die off. The zine-like literary journal The Toucan is at least a partial proof that print volumes can survive (and maybe the Internet is their salvation).

I’ll admit that I have a soft spot for submissions-based literary magazines. It’s nice to think that in the digital age (and the increasingly conglomerate-based publishing industry of today) that some people are still painstakingly choosing and collecting short stories and poems from aspiring authors and publishing them in zine form. Printed work has a way of feeling more personal, and when your reading material contains a variety of poems and stories by mostly anonymous individuals, the personal touch can be crucial. The Toucan retains this touch of intimacy, but the quality and variety of work is especially surprising in this little unassuming volume.

Issue 12 (Summer 2011) includes some really great pieces from writers and poets alike. Matt Morgan’s short story Doppelganger is a tense, twisty tale of a failed writer who becomes convinced that a successful lookalike is taunting him from afar. Paid in Full, a short story by Mike Tager, is a new twist on an old “crossroads deal with the devil” myth. Some works are stranger still; Ian Singleton concludes his blank-verse outtake from Shakespeare’s play in “The Villainy of Hamlet,” while Sarah Anne Stinnett’s standout poem “I Put the Ass in B(ass)” is two poems in one.

Even poems like “If Vegetables Had Skeletons,” by Brandon Amico, might not be for everyone, but many of these works feel like experiments or interesting digressions. Amico’s somewhat facetious poem wonders what would happen if all of our food had “ribs and teeth / beneath their flesh.” A few other works like “Playing Intergalactic Baseball” by J.J. Steinfeld or “Wedding Toast From the Best Man, Who Is Still Single For Some Reason” (also by Amico) provide levity and balance in a collection that sometimes becomes too navel-gazing for its own good.

For the most part, the works in this collection come off as assured and professional; their stories recall some of the more polished college creative-writing journals, and sometimes more mature publications. There’s not a lot in the way of formal experimentation; most writers diverge from the norm just enough to keep it interesting, but very rarely does the work feel particularly adventurous. On the contrary, this is the kind of literary journal that assures the reader that strong narrative voice and even blank-verse dramatic work will always have a place in print publishing, and will be appreciated.

The Toucan’s “Editrices Extraordinaires” Liz Baudler and Laura Rynberg are both Chicago natives and students at Columbia College, and their letter to the reader makes clear their intention to publish something that they’d want to read. On the whole, it feels like they’ve succeeded in creating a quality journal. The Toucan’s thirteen print issues include an impressive array of fiction and poetry, and although the magazine has moved most of its operations online, the journal lives on. In fact, the web edition allows it to live on and continue publishing new submissions; the move to online publishing has been relatively easy for The Toucan. However, I can’t help but hope that the print edition will resume someday and further prove the continuing viability of smart and interesting zines.

Sarah Becan

Sarah Becan’s comic book series Shuteye is, appropriately enough, about dreams. In the dream world of the comic book, logic becomes symbolic, coincidences become fateful, and characters learn about themselves in surprising ways. Readers are teased as well; strange things happen in comic books all the time, so how are we to know that this isn’t real? For Becan, the dream state becomes a narrative and stylistic testing ground.

Becan published the first issue of Shuteye in 2005, when her brother had been trying to get some of his stories published. Instead, Becan transformed them into comic narratives, and the first two issues of Shuteye were born. Several more issues followed, each with a silk-screened cover and zine-style binding. The final issue was completed in 2011.

In Shuteye’s sixth and final issue, The Fetch, overworked waiter and boyfriend Jan finds an answer to all of his problems in a mysterious doppelganger. After complaining of a bizarre dream in which his phone call to his mother was answered by Jan himself, Jan’s dream plays out exactly in a Christmas-themed miracle that allows him to be with his mother and girlfriend for the holiday. Soon, the two Jans have a system worked out to their mutual benefit (with doppelganger Jan doing most of the chores), and everything seems fine – until Jan’s girlfriend learns the truth. A surprisingly poignant ending rounds out an entirely unexpected and interesting narrative.

Other installments of Shuteye are similarly labyrinthine in structure and interested in exploring the many facets of the dream state. An estranged father and child swap dreams one night, a soldier discovers a desert city that reorders and reconstructs itself each night, and a hiking trip takes a turn toward the impossible. In each case, Becan plays on the relatable and experiential nature of dreams and what they mean for the dreamer (and ourselves).

Becan says of the series concept, “Some of the stories are based on dreams that I've had; some are just about the nature of dreaming, or the shifting logic of dreams.” She adds that the stories are “loosely connected”; at the end of each issue, the protagonist falls asleep and wakes up in someone else’s dream in the next issue.

Some writers might choose the more language-heavy and intellectual short-story medium when writing about dream narratives, but Becan sees the comic-book medium as something special. This type of storytelling has a strong connection with readers, she says: “Comics also have a kind of primal appeal for most of us. Just about everyone read the funny pages as a kid; we're all familiar with the lexicon. We all know how to read comics. They're approachable; they're not intimidating.”

Comics also present Becan with unique opportunities to represent the dream state artistically, as her characters are all rounded outlines and soft curves, often with a brushwork backdrop. The art recalls a children’s book and reminds the reader that he or she is entering a blurry state between reality and imagination.

Having completed a successful Kickstarter campaign, Becan will publish the completed series of Shuteye in one volume with, she says, an epilogue that ties back to the first story. Cyclical storytelling makes sense in a narrative about dreams; you end where you start, but it feels like you’ve grown and changed anyway.

Anders Nilsen

Big Questions is a pretty self-explanatory title for the “magnum opus” of Chicago-based writer Anders Nilsen. The story he chooses to tell in a collected 600 pages of comics and writing is indeed about the big questions. But what are those big questions? Nilsen says, “The usual, I suppose: life, death, foundations of human knowledge, the existence of god, stuff like that. Also: what are the best kinds of doughnuts, and whose fault is it when the giant egg explodes?”

All joking aside, Big Questions is nothing at which to sniff. After releasing 15 issues in zine form over the course of a decade, Nilsen and Drawn & Quarterly published a gift-quality collected edition in 2011. That's not bad for something that started so small; as Nilsen puts it, “The book started with me just playing around in my sketchbooks, doing little gag strips about birds eating seeds and talking about things that were a little bigger than they could really wrap their heads around.” In the end, however, it became a lot more. Big Questions has been an enormous project for Nilsen and is an engrossing read for comic lovers.

It’s hard to talk about what exactly the series is about, but in general, Big Questions follows a pilot who has crashed on a desert island and the talking birds that inhabit said island. The pilot and the birds clash repeatedly, illustrating the best and worst points of enlightened humanity. At 600 pages, the collected Big Questions is quite a lot of reading, but Nilsen’s work is about much more than talking birds; it’s about the human condition itself. As such, there are no easy answers, and everything is open to interpretation.

In most sections of the story, not much happens, and more goes unsaid. For instance, in issue #14 (“Title and Deed”), we encounter an underwear-clad man that seemingly only communicates in grunts. He befriends one of the birds, and the rest of the birds become suspicious that one of their own is fraternizing with a human. They attempt a rescue mission, but not before the pilot returns and finds the underwear-wearing man in his tent. They fight, the birds attempt another rescue, and finally the reader is left wondering why we sympathize the least with the pilot that would be the most civilized and communicative character in any other context.

One of the strongest points in Nilsen’s writing is the contrast between the humans (mute or surly, in this case) and the birds (chatty, organized, communitarian). The birds are planners, schemers, and interconnected; they talk to one another as we would, while the humans – cut off as they are from the rest of their kind – are reduced to muteness, anger, and being misunderstood. They don’t belong on this island, but the birds, along with their extended network of animal pals, fit right in. We can relate to the birds because they have the qualities of humanity that we hold most dear, while the humans have become severed from their sense of communal society.

Nilsen’s stark pen-and-ink style is perfectly suited to the story he wants to tell. Minimalist but never dull, his art pays close attention to body language. It has to, when several pages might go by with no dialogue at all. He also has to show birds in conversation with each other and showing emotion – not an easy feat. Nilsen says, “I try not to have the way I draw call too much attention to itself. I want the drawings to describe, as directly as possible, what's happening in the story. The quietness and slowness are probably products of my own temperament as much as anything.” The art constructs a lonely world, surrounded by blankness and devoid of color, for his lone protagonist and the birds to live in.

So what are some of the big questions? In this chapter alone, Nilsen asks the reader to think about which of the humans is more “human.” It could be the angry, violent pilot who speaks and acts like us, or the simple man who can form connections with animals (or is it the birds that resemble us most?). There’s the community versus the lone human, sociability versus aggression, speech versus intuition, and selfishness versus compassion. That’s a lot of heavy lifting, all in a few pages of sparsely inked art. Although Big Questions is a complete series, we can surely expect more beautiful and meditative comics from Nilsen in the future.

There are plenty of prose and poetry journals in the world — we profiled one just a few weeks ago — but what about a comics journal? Award-winning anthology series Papercutter is just such a publication; this ongoing series is “dedicated to showcasing the best young, underexposed, and emerging comic-book artists.” Published quarterly by Tugboat Press in slim black-and-white volumes, the Portland-based zine has just released its 17^th issue of original comics stories.

Jason Martin provides the seven autobiographical stories for this issue, each illustrated by a different artist. Using a different artist for each story seems a bit unorthodox, but the effect is rewarding; a cohesive thread of thought runs through the book, but the art shifts in style and medium with each artist. Each story takes on a slightly different tone depending on the type of art used in it. Stories set earlier in Martin’s childhood have looser, more cartoon-ish art, while the college-era tales use tight pen-and-ink strokes.

Martin opens with a childhood story of his own beginnings in comic-book writing, in the affecting “The Weeper.” He connects his early days of writing Batman stories with a personal “self-control” problem at school. Martin’s shifts between his real life and the life of his character, “The Weeper,” are well handled, as is his realization that he roots for his “villainous” analogue more than for Batman. He writes about missing out on childhood mainstay Nickelodeon, and about seeing a pretty girl singing in her car at a streetlight. The latter story, “Streetlight,” is only six panels long, but the dynamic art really pops, and a relatable sense of after-school camaraderie says everything about this memory for Martin.

“Scenes from the Fire” is the longest and most interesting of the tales. The story describes a house fire in the author’s college years and really packs an emotional punch; there’s hopelessness in the face of totally unanticipated danger, college students perhaps too young to deal with something as scary as a house fire, and the aftermath of an event that, though not physically violent, has shaken our writer to the core. Martin is brutally honest in showing his attempts to cope with the fire and, afterwards, his realization that he can’t deal with it. Details, like Martin’s reaction to the smell and even mention of fire, will ring true for anyone who has had to deal with a trauma like his. The story, however, ends on a hopeful note of emotional recovery.

Artist Calvin Wong provides some innovative art for “Scenes”; his interest in experimentation appears in the way smoke wreathes around all of the panels on a page, or a character is seen through the fish eye of a front-door peephole. Even the opening page plays with the usual format of a comic; three panels show our protagonists being mistaken for homeless people in a café, before showing the burnt-out shell of their house looming behind and around the final panel with the note, “which I guess we were.” The juxtaposition is heartbreaking and surprising.

Three shorter stories close out the issue. “Avo” recalls a touching visit from Martin’s aging grandfather, while “Meditations” shows a recommendation from a stranger on a John Coltrane album. Finally, “The Weaving of a Dream” returns to childhood with a grade-school visit from a local author. Small moments give these stories an authenticity for which all personal comics should strive — such as Martin saying of his grandfather’s visit, “It was the first time he’d recognized me in years”; or the author in the final story saying that she added blood to a painting because she wanted to be a part of it, and a concerned teacher jumping in with, “But you shouldn’t try that at home!”

Basing a whole issue around one writer’s stories may stray from the usual purpose of an anthology, but Papercutter seems to have no problem with experimentation. Though most of its earlier issues have been organized more or less like a traditional anthology or journal, others feature “parallel stories” from different authors or stories structured around a certain theme. Papercutter provides an important service to young comics writers — after all, don’t most prose and poetry writers start their careers by submitting to journals? The other result, however, is a beautiful zine collecting a lot of great stories.

Even English nerds have trouble with The Canterbury Tales (and this coming from a self-proclaimed English nerd). Long, famously unfinished, written in archaic English, and littered with centuries-old humor, Chaucer’s classic is dense and difficult to understand. There is hope, however! Readers who struggled through Chaucer’s original will love Seymour Chwast’s witty and stylish take on the story. This new offering from the author of the Divine Comedy graphic novel revisits and revises the Middle English tome and makes it much more enjoyable.

The graphic-novel edition’s brevity gives it the edge over Chaucer, not to mention its translation into modern English. Pages of prose are reduced to captions and dry dialogue, while the action is streamlined and organized into neat panel formulations. "The Wife of Bath’s Prologue" is one of many short and to-the-point chapters in the story (“I met the first of my five husbands when I was twelve. They were mostly gentlemen. Didn’t God say to go forth and multiply?”).

Chwast condenses the narrative until he finds a sort of absurdist humor in minimalism — something that should be even funnier for fans of the original. However, first-time readers will be glad to know that even when the stories lose some of their impact (or sense) in translation, the essence of the story survives.

The novel’s innovative experimentation with layout and panels will delight design buffs and bookworms alike. Chwast’s penchant for diagrams breaks up the story and allows for some narrative shorthand (such as when the bedroom farce in "Reeve’s Tale" is shown through dotted lines and numbering on a drawing of the beds). He even includes the asides from other characters in the margins of stories, giving the whole endeavor the collaborative and co-written feel of the original stories.

The Canterbury Tales, in Chwast’s hands, is quirky and imaginative. His pilgrims ride motorcycles, argue and interrupt each other, and tell the most shocking stories while still maintaining a sense of fun and humor. The writing manages to get across a sense of character while avoiding description almost entirely. Instead, the characters introduce themselves, just as in Chaucer, but in as few words as possible. Grotesque metaphors are made literal through pen and ink; there’s murder and sex and bathroom humor within pages of each other (or in the same story). And yet the whole novel feels downright classy due to Chwast’s clean art and organized storytelling.

Chaucer’s humor and social critique were always the best part of the original, and they mostly survive the transition to graphic form.  The essential story (a group of pilgrims travels to Canterbury and tells stories) gets an update, but not a rewrite.

This handsome hardcover forms a matched set with Chwast’s earlier Divine Comedy graphic novel, and it's a worthy follow-up.

When you see it on a bookstore shelf, Vain immediately stands out. Small, unassuming, and minimalist, the journal looks like something from another era among all the glossy, high-color publications that surround it. The two hand-bound paper volumes, held together by a paper strip with just the name and issue number on it, are intriguing in their blankness. There’s no hint of what’s inside, only an impression of refreshingly clean style. Curiosity compelled me to purchase it, but what kept me reading was the satisfaction that a classy and independent literary journal exists despite the virtual monopoly of highbrow imprints in the field.

Since 2007, Tia Orian and a team of volunteers have published Vain twice a year. With a mixture of artwork, photography, poetry, music, and even a short story or two, the journal is like a window into another world. After the virtual death of the publishing slush pile and an increasingly stratified arts industry, literary journals are somewhat out of vogue. Yes, they still exist, but as a part of arts and leisure magazines, or as a sort of trade publication for writers and artists themselves. It’s much rarer, in other words, for a layperson to pick up a literary journal today than it was 50 years ago. It’s even rarer to see a journal accepting submissions from just about anyone.

As a result, Vain Issue 10 was a pleasant surprise. I devoured it in one sitting, feeling a bit like I was unearthing literary treasure. Stephen North’s “The Psychic Receptionist” was a particularly fascinating read, as were JR Solonche’s poems. Photography and prints are interspersed throughout. An interview with stop-motion filmmaker Jess Bayliss and a music playlist push the boundaries of the format but fit in surprisingly well.

Orian’s commitment to integrity no doubt contributes to Vain’s overall impression of dedication to the arts and quality writing. Some names in Issue 10 were bigger than others, but when you think of artists being selected based on good, honest work, that makes sense. Orian says, “It isn't always the most artistically technical or most intricate or even the most critically acclaimed. When you can see the direct line to the heart staring back at you on the screen, you know you've hit the jackpot.”

While some of the contributors were fairly successful and others virtually unknown, the journal preserved a democratic setup by giving each their own space and reserving biographical information for the title page. Writing and artwork alternated, and the success of the volume as a whole gives me reason to think that the format will survive.

For Orian, this certainly is the hope. She says that journals speak to our society, no matter the era: “Literary journals mark the times and the lives of the people that have contributed, what they are interested in, what sufferings they are undergoing. It tells future generations about a society; they showcase cultures and are therefore timeless. In the fast-paced world, it's easy to forget how important they are.”

Perhaps we’re getting too serious about the whole issue. Lest we forget, the literary journal is also to entertain and open our minds. Orian hopes that the reader will have some fun with Vain. As she says, “Art needn't be grandiloquent, and no one should tell us what is beautiful and what isn't. Appreciation and happiness live in much smaller packages.” Or, in her succinct terms: “Anything goes.”

[Chromatic, our 400-page exploration of musicians and color, is out now. Order here!]

David Toop’s new book, Sinister Resonance, looks at the ubiquity and power of sound and silence in our lives, even if we rarely take note of it. What is it about a sudden noise in a darkened house, a lull in a conversation, or eavesdropping that quickens our pulse and plays on our emotions? This musician-writer sets out to enrich our understanding of what sound means in a primal, emotional sense.

Toop explains sound as something uncanny, even eerie, and generally of uncertain source. Sound is like a ghost — intangible, always just out of reach, impossible to pin down, a “present absence” or “absent presence,” tied to emotion and memory, uniting past and present. It’s an unconventional thesis, and his approach to the study of silence is appropriately academic, even methodical.

However, his evidence follows the interdisciplinary approach of media studies; Toop looks at every kind of book, film, and artwork imaginable and supports his claim with examples spanning two centuries.  Nothing is off-limits, from Sigmund Freud and Old Masters to creaky old houses. In fact, it’s Freud’s theory of the uncanny that gets the most attention, in connecting our emotional response with the sensual data of sound. Sounds and silence possess the power to unnerve us, and their sudden appearance (or absence) is often eerie.

Other scientific theorists get their due as well, but it’s Toop’s own sporadic and incredibly private anecdotes that drive his point home. The reader assumes the role of Toop’s much-discussed cultural eavesdropper (he states at one point that all listening is, in fact, eavesdropping), and the imagined sounds of his stories resonate with us in powerful ways.

Toop’s innovative exploration of the use of sound in silent media, such as paintings, is particularly interesting. Although the title implies that the work deals with sounds, Toop explores silence as well, as sound’s natural counterpoint and source of considerable human anxiety.

His ghost thesis seems like a bigger stretch than the other material (a cultural auditory history through various art forms feels more like the type of pop literature we’ve seen in recent years). However, once Toop connects his thesis to the experience of sound in the classic ghost story, his arguments gain traction.

It’s doubtful that many people were chomping at the bit to know why the score to The Shining is so effective, but Toop makes a case for his work. Sound is underrated, in what he calls our “visuocentric” society. In the preface, he notes, “A profound engagement with sound runs through all aspects of human culture, and yet in many cases that engagement goes unrecognized.” Our focus is on what we can see, touch, and hold — and therefore understand.

Toop’s tone occasionally reaches the lyricism that he clearly craves, but too often it falls back on dry academic-speak. Sinister Resonance never claims to be an easy read, despite disarmingly quirky choices of source material. It could be, however, an invaluable resource to writers and painters looking to investigate and incorporate the sort of multisensory experience that Toop describes. Tedious at times but incredibly well researched, Sinister Resonance is a surprisingly thought-provoking work of pop-culture analysis.