On the eve of the publication of THIEVES: A NOVEL, author Valerie Werder and Fence Editorial Co-Director Jason Zuzga connected to discuss the origins and complex life of this work. JZ: You were working in the art world when you wrote Thieves—how did your experiences lead to the writing of the novel? VW: I wrote […]
Excerpt from South
The empty hallways were covered with worn-out carpet. A ventilator worked against the smell of fish, burnt fat, and sweat. I felt a pain behind my eyes, in my temples. Some of the cabin doors had numbers on them. A sign directed me to the cafeteria where the night workers were eating dinner. I could […]
Amplification
H has a childhood memory of lying in bed at the farm listening to a soft, high pitch cut into the slow quiet. It’s a little like feedback but purer, like feedback’s crystalline cousin, and it gets louder until it’s directly behind her eyes. She lies still but begins to panic as it gets louder; […]
Thieves
Valerie is an art worker in the big city. Literally the product of an American childhood in a small place where she learned to value objects and their promise, Valerie now lives and works in a storm of things, many of which are commodities—including herself. While unhappily but compliantly selling paintings at a high-pressure art […]
Changes
The hooker slips his shirt off. In the moment where he can’t see me I steal a glance at his chest. His ribs. The lines of muscle showing abdominals. Not an ounce of fat. I look away before I’m noticed. For years I’ve printed shirts in this shop for a man teetering on the edge […]
Alternative Arrangements
This essay also appears in print on page 211 in the Forum pages of Issue #40. There is a form, that is not form, and that can be found in many collections of American poetry. This not-form is the arrangement. Rooted in the Romantic fragment, French prose poetry, palimpsestic modernism, Benjamin’s Arcades, Queneau’s Cent […]
All I Heard Was the Humming of Machines
The empty hallways were covered with worn-out carpet. A ventilator worked against the smell of fish, burnt fat, and sweat. I felt a pain behind my eyes, in my temples. Some of the cabin doors had numbers on them. A sign directed me to the cafeteria where the night workers were eating dinner. I could […]
A History of Fence
Including Essays by FENCE Editors and Selected Articles and Interviews In 2009, FENCE published a two-volume anthology entitled A BEST OF FENCE: THE FIRST NINE YEARS. They are available, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, through Small Press Distribution. The editors of FENCE up to that point in time contributed essays about their experiences working on the magazine, all of […]
The Emperor
When I was younger, I worked for some years as a tutor for a little boy who was the scion of a very wealthy family with its own peculiar culture and a whole battery of customs I never fully understood. I lived in a little cottage on the family property. Besides me and the boy, […]
Fumarole
The vending machine cast a fluorescent triangle into the darkness of the hotel lobby, a glow that seemed not to illuminate the floor but rather to float millimeters above it. We stood in the empty doorway. No other lights were on, inside or out, and the night sky behind us was a wash of black […]
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