“About Us” on the home page of Ampersand Books reads as follows:
Congratulations on your good luck and better taste, and welcome to Ampersand Books, The Greatest Literary Project of All Time, publishers of the eclectic and stimulating Ampersand Review, publishers of young blood with fresh ideas. We are here because we still believe in books and the people who read them. You are here because you do, too. Each of our books straddles the line between two worlds, refusing niche and category. The mainstream publishing world would never give these authors a chance, but between the Borrowed & the New, the Academy & the Street, the Timeless & the Hip, the Sacred & the Smutty, is an Ampersand.
This sprightly manifesto doesn’t quite compensate, however, for what’s under the titles—a series of images of underdressed women provocatively posed. On the sacred to smutty spectrum, these fall at a point that might be marked Unnecessary. So fas as I can tell, the site’s written contents don’t quite live up to the editors’ claims, but they are a lot less offensive than the graphics.
The page devoted to Ampersand Review currently contains excerpts from volume 5 of the print journal as well as the online supplement, also volume 5, containing about twenty pages of text viewable by turning virtual pages. Together, the print excerpts and the online supplement offer eight short stories and several poems.
The only longish story is “New Thresholds, New Anatomies,” by Robert Wexelblatt, a mostly told tale with a subtext about literary theory that nevertheless held my attention. A professor’s wife steps out of her university job to become an insider in a firm of accountants who specialize in “dodgy tax deductions.” She’s murdered in the company of a lover, either by the lover, or by her employers’ clients for what she may know about them. The story follows the professor’s responses to these events, some of them surprising, toward a neat ending made more interesting by his speculations about whether character is fate: “Can we really be the sum of our choices when to make a choice, a proper choice, is the work of a lifetime?”
All the other stories are flash fiction. Here as elsewhere, they take one of two forms. Either they establish and describe a situation, as does the once-upon-a-time part of a fairy tale. Or they establish a situation and then develop it in action, as a longer short story or novel does, but within the constraint of brevity. They advance, that is, to then one day, or plot. (Michael Martone suggested these terms in a recent lecture at Pacific University.)
The Ampersand stories that will stay with me are of the second kind. “No Real Surprise,” from the print volume, by Luke Goebel, presents remembered events cast in dream images surrounding a sorrowful boy who breaks the eye of a treasured stuffed bear. Ethel Rohan, in the story “In Rapture” from Ampersand Online, gives us the realistic encounters of a woman by herself in a bar.
The six poems excerpted from the print journal differ formally but share a pre-apocalyptic view of the world, describing the extremity and ugliness of the last days of life as we know it. In “To Your Health” by Tod Caviness, "The zipper don’t work on our jackets./ The drugs don’t work on our kids./ Our breath stinks,/ our teeth are cracking/...so no:/ we’re not drinking PBR to be cool anymore."
The seven poems in the online journal are harder to characterize. Lyric poems with some narrative elements. Their thematic link might be loneliness. The speaker of Joel Peckham’s “No-One Watching” shows us a man surfing Internet porn while his wife and son sleep. He hopes to connect with others without actually communicating: "If it’s true/ we change each thing we look at, can the woman/ in the screen feel his watching? The way he feels/ the eyes of the man behind the camera at the bank/ or the convenience store . . ."
Indeed, the editors and writers of Ampersand are communicating. Some of their ideas are fresh. Others are freshly expressed. A few of the pieces didn’t move me. An overall identity hasn’t quite seemed to gel around those ampersands yet. But it's worth hoping that it will soon enough.