WHLReview

145 Foster Street
Littleton MA 01460

The Wilderness House Literary Review is a publication devoted to excellence in literature and the arts.

To contact an editor simply click on a name below. To submit work to us please see "Submissions" below:

Editor & Publisher

Steve Glines 

Arts Editor

Bridget Seley Galway

Poetry Editor

Ravi Yelamanchilli

Fiction Editor

Joseph Carrabis

Nonfiction Editor

Steve Glines

Book Reviews Editor

Doug Holder

Poet in Residence

Tomas O’Leary

 Submissions

Deadlines are as follows
March 1 – Spring
June 1 – Summer
September 1 – Autumn
December 1 – Winter

Please read this section before submitting work.

Please include some form of identification in the work itself.

All submissions must be in electronic form. Our preference is an MS Word file uploaded through the system below. Please do not send us pdf files. We can't use them.

By submitting work to us you grant us a non-exclusive license to publish your work in any form we see fit. You may withdraw a submission up until the issue deadline (see above).

We don't pay so you retain all copyrights. If we publish your work online we may include it in a printed edition.

Poetry may be submitted in any length. Please don't submit 100 poems and ask us to pick 3.

Fiction may be submitted in three formats:

We also accept longer forms of fiction occasionally.

 Please, one fiction submission only per author, per issue. If you submit multiple stories for a single issue, we reserve the right not to review additional stories you submit after the first one.

Non-Fiction is just that so lets see some interesting footnotes. Non-fiction should be short, (a lot) less than 5000 words

Book Reviews should be positive unless the author is a well-known blowhard. Our mission is to encourage literature not discourage it..

Art: Minimun of 6 pieces. Please incluce a bio and statement about your work. Any form of art may be submitted with the constraint that it must be something that can be published in 2 dimensions. It’s hard to publish sculpture but illustrations together with some intelligent prose count.

Published works are welcome with proper attribution.

Please submit all works electronically. Click here to submit to Wilderness House Literary Review

Welcome to the 72th issue (Volume 18, no 4) of the Wilderness House Literary Review. WHLR is a result of the collaboration between a group of poets and writers who call themselves the Bagel Bards.

Lets get this out of the way. We use cookies, everyone uses cookies. Our cookies just tell us how many people take a look at Wilderness House Literary Review. Over the life of an issue we get about 4000 unique visitors. The cookies tell us who’s unique. If that's a problem We're sorry. Enough of that.

The stories, articles, poems and examples of art have been presented as PDF files. This is a format that allows for a much cleaner presentation than would otherwise be available on the web. If you don’t have an Adobe Reader (used to read a PDF file) on your computer you can download one from the Adobe website. These files are large and we hope you will be patient when downloading then, however we think the beauty of the words deserves a beautiful presentation.

Wilderness House Press has a Twitter feed and you can find us on Facebook or read about us on Wikipedia.

It costs quite a bit of money to keep publishing WHLR - Please help us out if you can as every little bit helps.

Our ISSN number is 2156-0153.

Let us know what you think in our Letters to the Editor.

Table of Contents

Opine

On the Cusp of History

It’s hard not to feel like we’re on the cusp of history. A knife edge where the wrong decision can plunge us into another dark edge. On the side of “good,” if it can be called that, we stand on our national honor to support the integrity of Ukraine, who willingly gave up their own nuclear weapons in exchange for the guarantee of the sovereignty of their national borders. The rest of Europe quakes at the prospect of Ukraine falling into the cesspool of the Putin empire. Poland could be next, the Baltics, Finland. It’s frightening or worse, the side of good could end up in a nuclear exchange with Russia, or the West could completely capitulate to another dark age.

Then there is the Israeli/Hamas war. War is never pretty, and the Palestinians have gotten a raw deal over the years, but to attack Israel the way they did and to publicly express the desire to kill every jew in the world steps way over the line. When Japan killed 1200 Americans in a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941, the US went to war. We didn’t stop until several million Japanese and Germans were dead, and their governments and military were completely defeated. That is the nature of war, and we can’t expect the Hamas war to end differently. But this war is also a proxy war encouraged by Putin (to draw attention away from Ukraine, and it’s been successful) and Iran, whose religious dictum encourages the murder of anyone not Muslim. The arms and munitions of Hamas were supplied by Iran, the hundreds of buzz bombs Russia has sent into Ukraine are made in Iran, and Iran is very close to having their own nuclear weapons if they haven’t already bought them from North Korea. It's easy to see this ending badly.

Then there is the lunacy of North Korea, the roaring mouse, and the vision of empire espoused by the “communist” leader of China who believes that everything, in both the South and East China Seas, belongs to him, Xi, China’s new emperor.

We are on a knife edge in history, and Occam's Razor suggests that a better solution is unlikely.

Search the house

Art

• Paul Bowen
• Phil Temples

Fiction

For your reading pleasure we offer an outstanding collection of short stories by:

Poetry

Enjoy the collection of poetry we have assembled.

Reviews

WHLReview is brought to you by:

Dosha, flight of the Russian Gypsies
by Sonia Meyer

Office
By Susan Isla Tepper

What Drives Men
By Susan Tepper

The Last of the Bird People
a novel by John Hanson Mitchell


Sophocles' Ajax
translated by Dennis Daly