Black Clock #11 features work by such prominent authors as Joanna Scott, Chris Abani and Susan Straight, and introduces the usual selection of dazzling new voices.
In Richard Powers’ “Over the Limit,” freely adapted from his just published novel, a young African woman genetically predisposed to happiness stands at the nexus of a brilliant, narcissistic scientist and the discontented moderator of a TV news magazine. In Rob Roberge’s “Stooge” and Lou Mathews’ “Hollywoodski,” Vegas drug deals go bad and drunken Tinseltown conversations run wild, and in Antonia Crane’s “Rosebud,” a self-designated “sexual outlaw” and stripper looking to retire gets caught up in the intrigues of an aging decadent Hollywood couple. In “This Is How the Past Turns Up”, Greil Marcus charts one of his patently revelatory longitudes between Barack Obama’s election-night victory speech, the fiction of Philip Roth, and Sam Cooke’s perennial contender for the greatest record of all time, “A Change Is Gonna Come.
