Red Bridge Press
$7.99 (Kindle)/$15.00 (paperback), 214 pages

Reinvigorating the Anthology:
Liana Holmberg’s and Deborah Steinberg’s Writing that Risks

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

Most of the time, I find anthologies, especially anthologies of recent work, to be distasteful. Reading them is often an exercise in boredom. There are a few instances that buck this tendency and really produce something worth reading. Lara Glenum’s and Arielle Greenberg’s Gurlesque at the time of its release is one such example. I happen to believe that Liana Holmberg’s and Deborah Steinberg’s 2013 anthology Writing that Risks: New Work from Beyond the Mainstream (Red Bridge Press) is another. I had a wonderful time reading this anthology of unusual stories, poems, and occasional forays into essays and memoir. In the introduction, Holmberg and Steinberg introduce their audience to these pieces:

We put out a broad call for “writing that risks”… [and] received almost five hundred submissions by brand-new to well-established authors. Their work ranged from surreal to experimental and fabulist to slipstream, with some that fit no category. Many of the authors told us these pieces were the closest to their hearts but the hardest to get mainstream publishers to take a chance on.

In fact, one of the best things about this collection is how the riskiness, or strangeness, is so often the driving factor. That these writings were rejected by mainstream publishers speaks more for mainstream publishing losing its nerve than it does for the various pieces, which, most of the time, are fabulous. Continue reading →