FICTION
9/7/21 Penelope’s Version – one act play – in Choeofpleirn Press’s literary journal Rushing Thru the Dark. At Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09GT8SX25/?coliid=I1EG3YETFNGBI2&colid=1JOIZVEEOIEYD&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it
7/3/21 Manufactured Goods online: Manufactured Goods | Unlikely Stories Mark V
There’s less new work out for publication [1] because I’ve been working hard on a new novel, BLUE MONKEYS – nearing the end of the first draft (nothing much, just decipher Minoan Linear A, Marwa’s back, Upper West Siders scatter to Seattle and Crete, not to mention – though now I do – a stupendous VFX of the ancient Santorini eruption for a film starring one character in THE FIRST END OF THE WORLD).
COVID confinement resumed after vaccination and booster as numbers rose again this past winter with Omicron variant. Can only hope that hibernation and plague will end with the novel’s completion and Spring 2022!
[2] Also, I have been sending out – & agents/publishers are now reading the completed 2nd novel NEW MARWA and 3rd short story collection FIRST FIFTH – summaries below!
NEW MARWA
This multicultural/multigendered serio-comic bildungsroman chronicles 5 years + (2000-2005 and coda 2015) in the life of Marwa Al-hal, a Muslim American-born daughter of immigrant Alexandrian Egyptians who lives in Battery Park City in NYC. The novel begins in the fall of 2000, when Marwa is a high school junior and almost concludes in 2005 in her college junior year as a Presidential Scholar at Fordham before a summer internship at a school in Mecca. Light-hearted in tone, substantial in content, this short novel presents an accessible portrait of the scientist as a young woman. The story nearly ends on Marwa’s 21st birthday, April 29, 2005, after the college junior has met with psychiatrist Dr. Rawi; has fallen in love with a Fordham Presidential Scholar, senior African-American James Beekmans; and has been arrested during protests at the Republican National Convention in NYC in the summer of ’04. Spring 2005 arrives after the coldest winter in 10 years, and Marwa unwraps a birthday gift James Beekmans can’t resist sending her, a new translation of DON QUIXOTE, inscribed without his signature, suggesting an enema but also expressing his affection. The CODA chapter takes place in 2015, Marwa in perspective ten years later when she is a researcher in NYC. She attends her younger brother’s college graduation in CA and another classmate’s wedding in upstate NY where, under August’s annual Perseid shower, she answers her best friend Judy’s question “What happened in Mecca?” As an expat New Yorker in Rhode Island, I needed to tell a story of my City over a time arc that would include but prevail beyond 9/11; a coming of age story of a Muslim-American girl who becomes a scientist evolved.
FIRST FIFTH OF THE 21ST
Right up through April, 2021, the stories in the collection FIRST FIFTH OF THE 21ST were accepted/published online/print in the first 20 years of the new century. The character Marwa reappears in four of them, and one [Denatural Selection] was published by the creator of Ploughshares who said it was “Borgesian’ – though I’d never read Borges. In other stories, an archeological artist on a dig at Akrotiri loses a tooth, a comedienne loses her wallet, but a hidden love letter to a major artist is found by her grandson. What Can the Matter Be? is the coda chapter to a third story published in The Kenyon Review. I placed the new How It Began last for depth perspective on the new, struggling century. We could all use at least two whiskey fingers of that FIRST FIFTH now.
POETRY
December, 2021 “September” on page 5 of beautiful black-covered print copy of DASH Special Edition 2021. Originally appeared in their 2011 Spring issue w/another poem.
September 2021 “Grisaille”accepted again this time by O:JA&L; Open: Journal of Arts & Letters. https://ojalart.com/poetry-all-forms-stylesl-shapley-bassengrisaille/?fbclid=IwAR15ogMLjvLi0QlsmkcUggEY2bvLvTigVBAvUd7GfzG99hXdDQu-Qfb5sLA
L. Shapley Bassen 