The twelfth issue of Caketrain, featuring new work from Kirstin Allio, Riley Bingham, Laurie Blauner, Bridget Brewer, Ryan Call, J'Lyn Chapman, Jessica Comola, Yonca Karakas Demirel, Alexandra Dillard, Zachary Doss, Sarah Rose Etter, Brian Evenson, Kelsie Hahn, Joel Hans, Ya-Wen Ho, Dan Ivec, Jacqueline Kari, Davy Knittle, Alyce Knorr, Darby Larson, Gary Lutz, Elizabeth Mikesch, JoAnna Novak, Kim Parko, Vanessa Place, Jessica Poli, Nick Francis Potter, Daniel Wessler Riordan, Sally Rodgers, Freddy Ruppert, Kathryn Scanlan, May-Lan Tan, Adam Veal, Vanessa Angelica Villarreal, Rae Winkelstein, Timothy Wojcik. Edited by Amanda Raczkowski, Joseph Reed, Tanner Hadfield and Katy Mongeau.

Caketrain Issue 12

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Caketrain Journal and Press

A Book So Red was the winning manuscript in the 2014 Caketrain Competition, as judged by Peter Markus. ### "A Book So Red's linguistic singularities, formal contractions, and world comprised of the existential non-sequitur coalesce into an astonishing aesthetic teratoid: the vacuum-packed denarration. The narrator's skewed, oblique and painful relationships teach us the only real comedy is the sound of laughter in the dark all the way down." -Lance Olsen, author of Theories of Forgetting ### "Rachel Levy is a wizard-gory, tender and wickedly funny." -Noy Holland, author of Bird ### "It's as if Rachel Levy put the carcass of the novel on the butcher block: choice language cutlets remain." -Sara Levine, author of Treasure Island!!! ### "Heartbreaking, horrifying, beautiful and ugly, the narrator of Rachel Levy's A Book So Red explores her world from the inside out with the precision of a mapmaker. From Munich to an American farm to Berlin and through a cast of characters, the one constant is her mirac¬ulous and astonishing voice." -Myfanwy Collins, author of The Book of Laney ### "Rachel Levy, here in what might at first appear to be a pint-sized collection of fractured miniatures, offers us instead heaving-with-feeling fictions that are elliptical and driven by suggestion, though what is most fully and singularly revealed here is a world where much is said-too much, this too might be true-so that what is left unsaid, what the speaker chooses to tell just us-her listeners in this se¬quence of most private tellings-takes on the heft of a bedside confession." -Peter Markus, author of The Fish and the Not Fish

A Book So Red

Levy, Rachel

This debut full-length poetry collection by Ben Mirov was the winning manuscript in the 2009 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, as judged by Michael Burkard.

Ghost Machine

Mirov, Ben

Poetry

"Very seldom anymore do I come across a book that makes me feel like everything--anything--is possible. Troublers does. Walsh's tautly elegant language renders a world at once iconic and strange, one in which every action and sentiment seems lovingly considered, mercilessly dissected, and expertly defamiliarized. A terrific first book, Troublers points to a new way of doing literature." --Brian Evenson, author of Windeye "Walsh's stories are so odd and wonderful that they seem to have been treasured from some heretofore nonexistent Eastern European country that should now, finally, be properly celebrated." --Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances "In Troublers, Rob Walsh entertains marvelous, profound little dances which never fail to twirl you somewhere you've never been. In his world, 'heartless betrayal is both the engine of modern television and a kind of stainless upholstery to which no ethical principal can stick.' But inside Troublers' beautifully rendered exterior lies a heart so pure. 'Let's poke the thing!?' as Walsh directs." --Terese Svoboda, author of Bohemian Girl "This hilarious collection may likely be the most honest portrait of human behavior you will ever read. Using the fantastic as pitch and the sinister as yaw, each story steers you on a hovering journey over the bumbling, spellbinding fields of all that we lose and fail to understand." --Alissa Nutting, author of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls "Troublers wields a pace of the impending. Declarative, modest, wry. Like Faulkner, Walsh layers and interlaces, envelopes us in heat and dryness and longing." --J.A. Tyler, author of Colony Collapse "It's pretty rare that a collection of short stories does anything for me beyond making me feel like I'm watching someone exercise. Rob Walsh, though, comes out of nowhere with Troublers, taking one insane premise after another and exploring them with sentences that catch you off guard at every turn. There's a story where a guy builds a playpen for his baby daughters and leaves them in the playpen for 40 years, until he dies. There's a woman who spends years digging a hole in her backyard for no specific reason. There's a baby who keeps waking its parents up in the middle of the night, touching their bodies strangely. Among the book's many tricks and traps and desperate people, it is the constantly stunning logic of Walsh's sentences that hold the ship together, at once both aurally resonant and bizarre, like, 'By glancing between my own bites, I supervised my wife's eating.' Overall, a good weapon kit of strange air for people who like Gordon Lish mashed against Matthew Derby and George Saunders after being locked in a closet for five years." --Blake Butler, author of SKY SAW

Troublers

Walsh, Rob

"There is a great imagination at work in the brilliant Collected Alex, a fiction that becomes increasingly complex in each of its three parts, the narrative turning inward and outward at different points, reaching an apex that is at once cerebral and visceral." - Michael Kimball, author of Big Ray * "A. T. Grant's debut is a haunting, a bildungsroman in which a boy's parents give him a dead body to carry, to care for, to befriend. The book sits on your neck, an immobile mass ghosting you down, compressing your spine: you dress the body, you feed it, the banal made enticing, talk to it, become brothers. Collected Alex is a simple theme that fugues an intricate, magical, sophisticated, urgent, gorgeous eidolon. Grant's words clamp on and refuse absolution." - Lily Hoang, author of Changing * "If Charlie Kaufman and David Lynch wrote an earnest Buddhist parable together, it might read like Collected Alex. The story feels accessible and elegant, like an allegory about today written by a lonely scholar a thousand years ahead. It's beautiful." - Ken Baumann, author of Solip * "Lovers of misterio autentico will find in Collected Alex a blissful experience. The flowing, deadpan narration of bizarre events leads not to the resolution of a made-up conflict but to something much, much better: the warmth that comes to the soul when it relaxes in good company." - Jim Woodring, author of Congress of the Animals * Collected Alex was the winning manuscript in the 2012 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, as judged by Michael Kimball.

Collected Alex

Grant, A. T.

Contemporary

"The captivating stories in Lake of Earth are meticulously crafted and full of sure-handed description. William VanDenBerg writes so much story into so few lines that it's easy to get lost in these bright fictions." - Michael Kimball, author of Big Ray "VanDenBerg's close calls drain the morbid from the mundane, siphoning from even the puniest sideshow of anonymity a graphic identity. This is writing with muscle memory, a séance of stark, and narrative so seamlessly soldered it maintains body temperature bloodessly."  - Kim Gek Lin Short, author of China Cowboy  "'There is another world outside of this one,' VanDenBerg tells us, and that's a pretty good description of Lake of Earth: full of intense, stark prose, these seven stories portray a dream-like world of characters who struggle with visions and hope. I think it's a terrific and daring book."  - Brandon Hobson, author of Deep Ellum "William VanDenBerg has created a sleepy version of suspense. People shift between consciousness and un-, spaces appear and disappear, objects transubstantiate, and all the while people are trying to share and reconcile and concern all the realities with each other. The tension comes in determining how long the tether can hold between connection and confusion, recognition and division."  - Jac Jemc, author of My Only Wife "The stories in Lake of Earth take us deep into the dream's dark heart. Writing with a deranged lyricism that recalls Matt Bell and Ben Marcus, VanDenBerg is relentless in his depiction of the strange."   - Robert Kloss, author of The Alligators of Abraham Lake of Earth was the runner-up manuscript in the 2012 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, as judged by Michael Kimball.

Lake of Earth

Vandenberg, William

"This book is a wonder. I laughed out loud early and kept on laughing, sometimes with recognition, sometimes with sheer delight at the precision with which Levine portrays the bafflement of being human and interacting with other humans. Read Short Dark Oracles for yourself and prepare to be both charmed and alarmed." Matthea Harvey, author of Modern Life * "Hemingway said somewhere that he wanted to write like Cezanne painted. In her vivid hyper-real collection, Short Dark Oracles, Sara Levine paints her way into even sharper and more dangerous cor¬ners. The fictions are an impasto of primed primary colors, prose that cuts a swath in brilliant swatches of saturated power that pops, punches, turns every turn into a fat flat facet, hard as a side of diamond, steel still-lives, glittering, metallic, distilled. Ernest be damned, I want to write like Sara Levine writes." Michael Martone, author of Four for a Quarter * "Levine's narrators are self-aware, self-deprecating, sardonic and more than a little funny. 'The Fainting Couch' alone is worth the price of admission, but Oracles offers other treasures just as lovely." Cooper Renner, author of Mosefolket * "Hilarious and triumphant, these stories will startle you on every page, and on every page you will marvel over Levine's intelligent, passionate mind." Deb Olin Unferth, author of Revolution * Short Dark Oracles was the runner-up manuscript in the 2010 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, as judged by Deb Olin Unferth.

Short Dark Oracles

Levine, Sara

The eleventh issue of Caketrain, featuring new work from Joseph Aguilar, Jessica Alexander, N. Michelle AuBuchon, C Dylan Bassett, Ruth Baumann, Matt Bell, Eric Lloyd Blix, Trevor Calvert, Hunter Choate, Benjamin Clemenzi-Allen, Jon Cone, Stella Corso, Patty Yumi Cottrell, Lindsey Drager, Tim Earley, Sarah Rose Etter, Knar Gavin, Pamela Gesualdi, A.T. Grant, Lindsay Herko, Robert Lopez, Matthew Mahaney, Elizabeth Mikesch, Muxxi, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, Eleanor Perry, W.R. Porter, Meghan Privitello, Jessica Richardson, Alan Sondheim, Emma Sovich, Boyd Spahr, Adam Strauss, Sara Veglahn, Tom Whalen. Edited by Amanda Raczkowski, Joseph Reed, Tanner Hadfield and Katy Mongeau.

Caketrain Issue 11

"Megan Martin's muscular, gleaming prose contends with how we as humans cope with the itchy banality of reality. Stuffed with imagi-nary men, future bathtub deaths, sick black jellies, meteor lettuce, and vagi¬nas full of Jesus light, Nevers emerges from the tension between what is real, what is perceived, what is felt and what is completely imagined. What makes Martin such an amazing writer is that it's hard to discern the differences-and it doesn't even matter." Melissa Broder, author of Scarecrone * "Nevers is that feeling you get when you are suddenly inside your-self, looking around, going, Hey, that's my coffee mug. That's my pen. I am me. It's like standing in your childhood home as the walls are replaced with snapshots of the same walls. This is a book, only it has a mouth." Lindsay Hunter, author of Don't Kiss Me * "In Megan Martin's fantastic Nevers, we encounter the situation of a book that is conscious of itself. This seems right, because the life in its pages is conscious of itself, too-all at once, from a dozen slip-sliding angles, the whole a shimmering phantasm held aloft by an act of voice so clean and real it can squash your heart." Scott Garson, author of Is That You, John Wayne? * "This book could breastfeed a twelve-year-old boy. This book could have an adulterous affair with an undiscovered marsupial species. This book could write online dating profiles for Wyoming's vast population of robot foxes who have been widowed by hit-and-run crimes. This book is not about the apocalypse, but it has that I-got-sick-of-my-boyfriend's-nose-hair-and-Sartre's-giving-me-cramps-and-the-only-way-I-can-think-to-stall-the-imminent-threat-of-mass-extinction-is-by-adopting-a-feral-cat-and-aren't-we-useless-and-fucked type of apocalyptic glee about it." Tessa Mellas, author of Lungs Full of Noise

Nevers

Martin, Megan

"In Joseph Aguilar's poem films and prose laboratories we farm charged moments. We oscillate inside their oracular machineries. We absorb in the flicker between pages such sonic precision and syntactical grace we are able predict our final five minutes of life." Eric Baus, author of Scared Text

Half Out Where

Aguilar, Joseph

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