Delight in the Surprises: A Literary Magazine for Mainstream and Experimental Writing

The voice is very strong in this piece. There is hilarity and complete seriousness all at once.

Another piece with fantastic voice was “Fausto,” by Patricia Engel. The story is set in Florida, and centers on Paz, a young Colombian twenty-something in love with Fausto, who gets her into some trouble. Both she and Fausto were great characters to spend time with, “Fausto used to say that all this, the hurricanes, the beach, the boring jobs, wasn’t real life—we were still in the womb and we’d really be born once we made some money, the kind of money where you don’t have to worry about your car dying on the road, you can buy bags and bags of groceries, where you can pay all your bills and you don’t have to buy crap at the flea market instead of a real store.”

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts has an essay called “Here is the Evidence,” in this journal, centering on the history of Harlem and intertwining her personal experiences in the city. It was very informative, if not a little long. I liked that it mixed the intellectual with the tangible, colorful stories she picked up from the people she met along the way, “There are other stories I have forgotten because I didn’t write them down, and if I lived on a different block, I would be told different stories.”

I’ll close this review with a quote from Jeffrey Lependorf’s document “Dining with Proust,” from this issue, “I think we all do something like this when we read, especially when we love to read; we allow one thing we’re reading to suggest something else to read and find delight in the surprises and correspondences generated between the texts along the way.”