Southampton Review Is Back
After a year's hiatus, Stony Brook Southampton's M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature is out with a new Southampton Review literary journal for the winter and spring. This one's dedicated to Melissa Bank, the author of, notably, "The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing." She died at her house in East Hampton in 2022. She taught at the college, too, and is represented here by fiction, a screenplay, and several pieces "on craft."
You'll also find work by Star contributors like J Brooke, with a poem, "The Day After Wikipedia Still Lists Her in Present Tense," about, yes, Melissa Bank, and Baylis Greene, an editor here, with "Bag Man," a remembrance of hard-working times way out west. It's all mixed in with pieces by the likes of Rick Moody, Meg Wolitzer, and Patricia Marx.
On the Best Indie List
John Tepper Marlin, former federal and New York City economist, author, man of Springs, and veteran contributor of "Guestwords" to this paper, has just seen his latest work, "Under Nazi Noses: How a Dutch Banker Heisted $1 Billion to Fight Hitler," named one of the "Best Indie History & Biography Books of 2024" by Kirkus Reviews.
That Amsterdam banker was Walraven van Hall, responsible for "the biggest bank fraud in Dutch history." Mr. Marlin's mother was his cousin. Now Mr. Marlin has brought that story to light in English with this translated and annotated version of the biography by Erik Schaap, a Dutch journalist.