My June travels through the Hudson Valley have uncovered some interesting titles about and from the region. Today’s reading suggestion is one I found on the shelves at Oblong Books. It’s a rather unique essay collection from Bard College called An Anatomy of Roads: The Quest Issue, the 44th edition of the college’s literary journal, Conjunctions.
The issue explores “the fascinating, complex process of defamiliarization as the ultimate path to knowing oneself” as revealed in a series of poems and fiction pieces. Bristish author Jon McGregor offers a story of a distraught man who travels to an unnamed island in search of his lost father. David Schuman’s story “Miss” is an eerie modern desert journey in which a man and his daughter, who is convinced that she is a cat, encounters the mother who abandoned him working in a Twilight Zone-like diner in the middle of nowhere. “Kronia,” by celebrated fantasy writer Elizabeth Hand, details a love story that may or may not have actually happened over the course of decades around the world.
These stories and over twenty more have been gathered together in this collective journey of the mind. A few are available online at the archives of the journal’s website.