96th of October Editions
96th of October Editions is actively interested in new manuscripts that align with the titles given below. Your submission should include, pasted into the body of the email, the most impressive five page sample of your book, and a very brief outline. Submit your work here.
Science Fiction
Jim Cheff, Phantom Limb Radio;
Metaphysical thriller. Join Vayle Endlight in The Periphery — a world that’s a misheard whisper, and a million miles, away from our own. With illustrations by the author. Click author’s name for bio and work in 96th of October; click title to purchase, click here to sample book.
Th. Meztger, Shock Totem
Th. Metzger’s original work of renegade history is Blood and Volts: Edison, Tesla and the Electric Chair. But as both sequel and prequel, first there came Shock Totem. The two electrical giants lurk in the novel’s background, battling on the astral plane for possession of a schizophrenic boy with rare psychic powers and a tricked-out disco van. Far more potent a deity is James Brown, the Ultimate Funk-Lord and Godfather of Souls. The story is a quest – across the Burnt Over District of New York State, ending at Love Canal, America’s premier toxic waste nowhereland. Published originally as a “novel of medical terror,” Shock Totem is in fact a lost and found gnostic gospel in which electrical power is the modern manifestation of divine wind and fire. Click title to purchase, author’s name for his work that has appeared in the magazine.
Horror
Fosythia Groundhogg-Robin, Seducing the Ferryman
The author is a true encyclopédiste, eighteenth-century style, like Diderot or the dear old Marquis. What makes it worth reading, and has earned its author a place in the pantheon of our regular contributors, is the understated humor and poetical style that disarm disbelief and create an experience of the extraordinary. Like her forebear Ovid, Ms. Groundhogg knows that we’re still ready to believe in mythology if we aren’t first told we must take it seriously. Here, as at the opera, you leave your common sense with your hat and coat on entering and enjoy a rich aesthetic experience on its own terms. Click title to purchase book. Click author’s name for work that has appeared in the magazine.
Gerard Loughran, The Leopard’s Reward
Why did Joe dodge his shift down the mine and what happened when his brother took his place Why did an encounter with an upturned glass so terrify a group of newsmen Just what was the dire prophecy of Seaman Flack What will be the terrible consequence of Klara s pregnancy These and other intriguing questions are posed in Gerard Loughran’s short stories, written after many years of foreign reporting and set in venues as far apart as Africa today and yesterday, Austria in the days when Jews couldn t be doctors, Germany in the distracted memories of an old soldier and our own not-quite-so-cosy Home Counties. Click title to purchase book. Click author’s name for work that has appeared in the magazine.
Fin de Siècle
Else Lasker-Schüler, Styx, translated by Mildred Faintly
Else Lasker-Schüler’s first book, Styx, is a psychedelic tour of the late Symbolist/early Expressionist imagination. Erotic, optimistic, exuberant, she paints the free-love eastern-mysticism infused world of the German soul before World War One, when Berlin was still a small town bohemia. Her poetic impasto is as urgent as Van Gogh’s, her rainbow-colored visions as pleasing and cheerful as those of Peter Max.
Jean Lorrain, Le Sang des Dieux (The Blood of the Gods) translated and annotated by Justin Brumby.
The first volume of poetry by Jean Lorrain, the queerest of the French Decadents. This classic of lurid loveliness is perhaps the most perfect expression of the Pre-Raphaelite sensibility in verse. A classic of Arthurian imagination, it has the greatest poetic portraits ever maid of Vivien, Enid, Elaine and Guinevere. Bilingual, facing page French and English. Click title to purchase.
E. Alan Mackintonsh, A Highland Regiment, and, Death the Liberator. Edited and annotated by Jacob Rabinowitz.
Killed in the Battle of Cambrai in 1917 at the age of twenty-four, Mackintosh was unique among World War One poets. A as far from propaganda as from pacifism, he used Celtic myth and the folklore of Scotland to interpret the reality of trench warfare, with results that are frequently phantasmagoric. Click title to purchase, author’s name for his work that has appeared in the magazine.
Anna Margolin, Lower East Suicide, translated from the Yiddish by Mildred Faintly
An undiscovered 1929 masterpiece of women’s literature; the first great poetic expression of lesbian love in the modern world, set in Jazz-Age New York City; Symbolist and Decadent fantasmagoria suffuses her work. Hers is a surreal world of ghosts and magic, forgotten gods and paranormal romance; uncannily foreshadows the “confessional” poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton; first uncensored translation from the Yiddish. Click title to purchase.
Renée Vivien, Tentative Melodies, translated from the French by Justin Brumby.
To say it all in the fewest words, Vivien is the lesbian Baudelaire. With the necrophile eros of Edgar Allan Poe, the decadent opulence of a Symbolist painter, and the pride of a Sapphic satan, this book will plunge you, as no other, into the fevered dream of Well of Loneliness Paris.Bilingual, facing page French and English. Click title to purchase.
Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx, edited and annotated by Justin Brumby
A poetic catalogue of the erotic misdeeds of Middle Eastern deities, this poem is a gesture of defiant gay pride, and a masterpiece of decadence. Wilde worked on it for 11 years, and published it in 1894, one year before his trial. This is the first edition of the poem in a century to reproduce the ten Charles Ricketts illustrations, and the only one ever to fully annotate the obscurities of the text. Click title to purchase.
Judaica
Rachel Blaustein, Complete Poems, translated from the Hebrew by Mildred Faintly
The first complete translation into English! “Rachel Blaustein’s poetry, written in the dawn of the twentieth century, was the first great lyric expression of modern, living Hebrew. She made it possible for Jews to see themselves as a people with their own beauty—their own language, their own poetry, and (every people’s right) their own country. Similar claims might be made for other modern Hebrew poets, but Rachel Blaustein did what no other poet even attempted. She restored to Hebrew literature the feminine element so long lost to Judaism and to the scriptural religions that developed from it. But the decisive argument for Rachel Blaustein’s special greatness is this: we admire Bialik, we are delighted by Amichai, but Rachel—we love.” Click title to purchase; click translators name for work that has appeared here.
Iris Horowitz, Faces of God
Canaanite mythology took on renewed life in the Hebrew Bible to the same degree that Classical mythology did in Milton’s Paradise Lost. This study uses Mircea Eliade’s methodology to uncover these significant forms. A work of inestimable value to anyone interested in the Biblical world, or even in the Kabbalah, for these same archetypes flourished even more luxuriantly in the mystical novel which is the Zohar. Click title to purchase.
East Asia
Oona Fernsby, Gone Beyond
The only clear and accurate translation into English of this small sutra which is, as it were, the Mahayana Buddhist “Lord’s Prayer.” The dazzling but bewildering Form and Emptiness paradoxes are here made understandable by a historical and philological understanding of the Sanskrit terms, without pious mystification. Click title to purchase.
Ottilee O’Malley, Even Unto China
An anthology for Chinese literature, including Confucius, the Thousand Character Essay, and Du Fu. Sinologlists, as a rule, aren’t poets; poets, as a rule, can’t master Chinese. O’Malley manages both. Her translations are truly poetry, and her scholarship is such that she says more in a paragraph than an full professor could in a book. Click title to purchase.
Ottilee O’Malley, Woman in Chinese
For the first time: the female experience recorded by women and encoded in the pictograms of the Chinese characters, and the female composition of the inner chapters of the Classic of Poetry. This book, with its clear images of the characters, explained in detail, and its splendid translations of the women-written poems of the Classic of Poetry, vastly expands in time and space the record of female genius. To this is added a translation of the poetry of Li Ching Jao, the great woman poet of the Sung dynasty, whose work can now be appreciated for the first time for its truly unique qualities, as the culmination of a Chinese women’s literary tradition.
Ancient World
Jocelyn Beckett, Devil Girls of Ancient Rome
Catullus, Propertius, A Psychic Geography of Classical Masochism, The Rotting Goddess. All the good parts of ancient learning, usually left in Latin for the moral protection of curious juveniles. Click title to purchase.
Sappho, Sappho for Girls, a Lesbian Feminist Translation, translated from the Greek by Jocelyn Beckett
The first and greatest lesbian poet, called “the tenth muse” by the Greeks, here in the first accurate uncensored translation, made with the passion and candor only a transgender lesbian could have brought to the task. Click title to purchase.
Iris Horowitz, Buried Angels
The earliest Christian archaeology: a graphic cosmology incised by members of the Church of James; a rediscovered fragment of the Q text; analysis of the “Mythologies of Reason” which structure scriptural religion. Click title to purchase.
Contemporary Poetry
Mildred Faintly, A Peep Out of Me
The author explains, “Other people’s poetry is like other people’s pets: untidy, annoying, and nothing you want in your house. If only it were like other people’s perversions: conveyed in few words and endlessly entertaining. Well, my poetry is like a perverted pet that does amusing tricks. Hope that helps.” Click title to purchase.
Jacob Rabinowitz, Blurred Person Singular
Bisexual postmodern poetry, a rude exuberant early work by an author of “Blame it on Blake.” Ovid’s Metamorphoses adapted for film by Buster Keaton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade. Click title to purchase; click author name for work that has appeared here.
Magic Realism
David Lott, Back in Brockford
In this series of linked short stories , by turns affecting, humorous, and slightly off-kilter, David Lott introduces us to the small Southern town of Brookford and several of its more interesting residents. Following the characters through the decades-from the ’60s to the ’80s, to the early 2000s and beyond-we see the difficulties they face, the shameful secrets they keep, the too-few triumphs they celebrate. As their paths cross and tangle, as their stories bounce ahead in time and then back again, we also see that the great fondness they share for their hometown is perhaps the one thing in their lives that never changes. Click title to purchase; click author name for work that has appeared here.
Non-Fiction
Shoshana Kerewsky, 50 Days in May
In short lyrical prose and poems, the author considers her pilgrimages on the Camino de Santiago. Her reflections touch on birds, Columbus and Isabella, a pilgrim’s death, being Jewish in Spain, the hero’s journey, the mythic and symbolic, meditation, the quest for balance in the pilgrim and the pilgrimage, and the malleability of story. Her memoir, Cancer, Kintsugi, Camino, won a 2023 Firebird Book Award. Click title to purchase.
Shoshana Kerewsky, Cancer, Kintsugi, Camino
Not just a memoir of breast cancer and the Camino de Santiago. It’s also about Jewish identity, atheism, family, AIDS, COVID, metaphors and similes, breathing, bricolage, journeys, self-reflection, and hypothetical cuckoos. Through richly-layered fragments of lyrical prose and poetry, the author conveys the rhythms of thought, feeling, and walking in a sparkling narrative mosaic. Click title to purchase.
Th. Metzger, Big Noise on the Astral Plane
Hallucinogenic traveler, rock and roll shaman, practitioner of ancient Chinese healing arts, and cosmic clown: Dr. Rudy Kilowatt was all of these – in his own words, “a Big Noise on the Astral Plane.” Born and raised in the Burnt Over District (where once, long ago, more wild-eyed religion flourished than in any place on earth), Rudy Kilowatt was the last in a long line of prophets, mystic mountebanks, seers, and mad revelators. Now, Th. Metzger tells all, celebrating his many voyages into incandescent high weirdness with the amazing Dr. Kilowatt. Click title to purchase, click authors name for work which has appeared in the magazine.
Th. Metzger, Flaherty’s Wake
Father Charles Flaherty was called a saint by his band of followers, and a heartless baby-killer by his enemies. He was, in fact neither, but something far more: serving as a legal advisor and advocate for the poor, arguing dozens of court cases, boxing with the reigning heavyweight champion, accused of statutory rape (and found innocent), then perjury, bribery, fraud, and practicing medicine without a license. After decades of battle with Roman Catholic and law enforcement authorities, he was finally convicted of manslaughter in an abortion case and sentenced to seven years in Auburn State Prison, home of the original electric chair. Here, in secret, he wrote his life story, leaving out none of his unpunished crimes or unsung acts of heroism. Click title to purchase, click author’s name to read an excerpt.
Jacob Rabinowitz, Blame it on Blake
A memoir of Beat generation authors, with explorations of Witchcraft, Egyptology, Voodoo, gender confusion and mind-altering drugs, authorized (more or less) by William Blake. Click title to purchase.
Classics
Dante, Purgatorio, translated by Jacob Rabinowitz, maps and diagrams by Jim Cheff
An accurate translation of the Purgatorio with all notes and clarifications poetically woven into the text so as to permit an immediate reading with full understanding, instead of a scavenger-hunt through the footnotes. This new edition contains copious maps and genealogies to clarify the history, geography, astronomy and cosmology. Click title to purchase.
Dante, Paradiso, translated by Jacob Rabinowitz, maps and diagrams by Jim Cheff
Dante’s epic of interstellar travel, for the first time presented with all footnotes and clarifications poetically woven into the text, with inset maps, genealogies and diagrams where needed in the text itself. Click title to purchase.
John Dryden, Annus Mirabilis
This poem was written when Dryden was thirty-six, when he had already written four plays, but none of those that would establish him as the foremost dramatist of his time. Annus Mirabilis was an ambitious and successful bid for public notice and royal patronage—a year after it was published, he was poet laureate.It is an audacious masterpiece, and unique in English as a successful epic poem in a contemporary setting. Click title to purchase.
Heinrich Heine, Germany: A Winter’s Tale, translated by Jacob Rabinowitz
Heine’s Hallucinatory tour through German history and mythology; facing page German text. Click title to purchase.