Gobshite Quarterly # 19/20

Pacific Northwest fictions feature Tom Spanbauer recovering from illness under the trees on his street, Sean Davis driving for the first time, bringing his father home from a bar at 0 dark thirty, and Michael Sage Ricci finding the true nature of superheroes. Essayist David Hapgood watches his bus drift apart on the mountains of Morocco. Pacific Northwest poets include Christopher Luna, Brenda Taulbee, Coleman Stevenson, and surrealist JM Reed.

Internationally, fiction and screenplay writer Pavel Lembersky tells us a love story, film scholar Janina Bocksch explores movement in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, film scholar Sergio Morera explores Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. We round out with collages from Bosnia Hercegovina, Cross+Fikaris illustrating the history of cannabis in Australia, and poems from Russia, Morocco, Iran, Lithuania, Albania and Switzerland. Cover art by Australian watercolourist Graham Willoughby.

Pan-lingual Gobshite Quarterly, where Paul Krassner meets Vénus Khoury-Ghata, is my favorite source for Hungarian fiction that reads like a song (＂Hogy jaj. jaj. jaj. semirol semmi fogalma nines...＂). Here English language poems, short stories, and ＂reasoned rants＂ nervously traverse a dark alley, past hipster Arabs, dangerous Czechs, Spanish cantoras.... - Chris Dodge, Utne Magazine

I did two books and many more multilingual magazine projects with GobshiteQuarterly. They’re linguistic treasures. They’re language-discoverers and -savers. Croatian, German, Serbian, English, Tagalog, Icelandic, Russian, Spanish, Bengali in my case. Being human is to speak, hear, write in languages, & GobshiteQuarterly makes the world more human. - Christoph Keller, winner of the 2020 Alemannic Literary Prize

Gobshite Quarterly has been invaluable in introducing Croatian writers to the United States. Documentary, imaginative accounting, recounting, warning, horror, daily moments, textures of continuing life: writing emerging from the war, writing the world had to see. Gobshite published it, in a dizzying number of languages, and continues to do so. - Julienne Busic, Croatian writer and translator

I turn to Gobshite to discover and add to my research and study of PNW authors. It is go-to. But Gobshite Quarterly is much more than a regional journal. Gobshite’s attention and curation and far-reaching includes the best international poets, broadening my horizons issue after issue. It is go-to. - Jeff Sargent, poet/reviewer

Now more than ever, Gobshite’s ambitious, ingenious, and unexpected multilingual publications serve as an antidote to the ever more toxic xenophobia which has been corrupting our culture since 2016. These issues persistently remind American readers that there’s a larger world out there than the one they live in. - Madison Smartt Bell