Casavaria Publishing :: Literature Selections: Fiction

The best fiction is always somehow experimental, engaging in unusual narrative structures or grammatical digressions, or simply seeking, even at unabashedly daunting length, a new perspective. In this spirit, Casavaria invites work that is stylistically adept and contains unique thematic elements for probing the vastness of human experience, as these are the luminary qualities inherent in successful fiction.

LA PIETÀ

A human love is not a fetish, not a ritual item nor a stone tablet to be referenced and stored in secret jeweled casings. It may at times seem so, even seem appropriate to paint it as such. It may be treated that way openly or in secret, but not without its true form being put at great risk of disintegration and disappearance. [Full Text]

TRAVELING, WITHOUT TIME

one continent lifts up the antidote to another, the complement, the other shades of a life lived close to the source, a passion as much unwinding itself in the wind of circumstance as curling up into its own inevitable form, ever more real as it seeks out the perfect tone for the recognition of its whole musical scope... [Full Text]

FAULTLINES ARE LIFEGIVERS

we are wrong to want to 'get beyond' or even 'smooth over' the imperfect, because that separation between one thing and another, even between ideal and actual, is what gives the constellation of difference in which we all come to be, in which all human relations situate both the core and the outer limits of their reason for being... [Full Text]

NO MORE THAN I AM: NOTES FROM THE MARGINS OF SELFHOOD
Joseph Robertson

I can be no more than I am; in the end, I can be no more than I was, and there is a faint solace in thinking it that way. I am a vanished individual. The logistics are somewhat complex, their planning anonymous, and it has been a long night of figuring before I could ascribe a name to my loss. It has very much to do with language, speech, the human project as (ideally) a proliferation of truth and understanding. In the new incarnation of the vigorous old presses, in the mechanics of media, I was a workaday cog, a body criticast, a voice. [Keep reading...]

FOOL'S GOLD
Margaret McGavin de García

The jardín was as beautiful as he remembered, the flowers and lush greenery shocking to his winter eyes. Here was paradise where the harsh barrenness of the biting North was unknown and the perpetual crowd of Sunday lovers took for granted sunshine, laughter and sweet uncovered flesh in January…But the teenage girls in their jumpers from the secundaria looked so much younger, and he recognized no one. No one recognized him either, he realized with a certain bitterness. Was a year so long?

Turning the corner at Aldama, he tried to pretend it was a year ago... [Keep reading...]

Still Lifes & Embers at Finisterre: a novel in perpetual motion
Joseph Robertson

» SUSTENANCE BY PERJURING

Storms become quiet. The many-faceted intersecting tensions of one moment, then another, slacken. Night opens onto an atemporal expanse without repetitions, clean of suppositions.

Today, we spoke of mortality and human defiance. We spoke of denial’s strong and necessary foundation of knowledge. It was asked whether a human ‘purpose’ could be located or unveiled...

» IN PINE-SILVER RELIEF

To advance from house of light to house of light with only the bare rhythm of the vast untouched illusion of weather guiding is a prayer, a deep ascetic meditation on the entitlement of every life to live in a house of light...

and the breathing of a first new brushstroke of vibrance in the open air, that breathing is the only meaning...

» A FACE

This face approaching specifies no world. This face I see belongs to a young woman with a very old story to tell. She has lived within the story all her life; it quiets her, and it speaks for her; she contains it, though she believes it to be much larger and more significant than she.

She will want to speak, but she will be prohibited by her guilt, a sense of culpability, as from profound involvement, but really born of too-heavy memories. All this can be read in the pause that overtakes her face...

LANGUAGES ENDANGERED WORLDWIDE
WORLD CULTURE NEWS FROM CASAVARIA'S SENTIDO PROJECT

As many as half of all known languages may die out during the next century. That figure is already staggering, but paired with the estimate of 6,800 believed to be spoken today, it represents a looming cultural catastrophe. In a world where languages with less than 10 million speakers are considered to be "minor" or "obscure" languages by many people, the world's native and regional languages are threatened. [Keep Reading]