The Fixed Idea (Electric Literature's Recommended Reading Book 8)

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Ann Kjellberg, editor of Little Star and guest editor of this issue of Recommended Reading, says "April Bernard is a big-game hunter of voices." Here, Bernard introduces us to an "only-slightly-successful butter-knife-wielding actor" and a "bleakly funny writer-on-the mend", both recovering in an asylum upstate they've nicknamed the "Holdon Hospital".

About Recommended Reading:
Great authors inspire us. But what about the stories that inspire them? Recommended Reading, the latest project from Electric Literature, publishes one story every week, each chosen by a great author or editor. In this age of distraction, we uncover writing that's worth slowing down and spending some time with. And in doing so, we help give great writers, literary magazines, and independent presses the recognition they deserve.

About the author:
April Bernard's most recent book is a novel, Miss Fuller. Her fourth collection of poems, Romanticism, is now available in paperback. She teaches at Skidmore College and in the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars.

About the guest editor:
Little Star is a new magazine of poetry and prose. It has appeared as four annual print editions (Little Star #4 is just now available in bookstores and on line), as a web-based literary diary, and, most recently, an app—endeavoring to capture both what’s fresh and what’s enduring in our literary life. Little Star’s writers have included Lydia Davis, Mark Strand, Padgett Powell, Jamaica Kincaid, Adam Zagajewski, Derek Walcott, Tim Parks, Gary Snyder, James Kelman, Paul Muldoon, Rosanna Warren, Seamus Heaney, Wislawa Szymborska, Kathryn Davis, Thomas Bernhard, Don Paterson, Denis Johnson, Binyavanga Wainaina, Per Petterson, Eliot Weinberger, Durs Grunbein, and Zbigniew Herbert, among many others. Little Star has recently opened an online bookstore, culling book recommendations for our readers from our various editions. Editor Ann Kjellberg gropes for generalizations about Little Star’s mission. “If I’d have to define it,” she writes, “I’d say that in poetry we try to identify the point where formal invention most vitally meets experimentation, and, in prose, where the sentence-bending modernist legacy of Beckett, Proust, James, Joyce, and Kafka is finding its newest expression.”