Welcome to Euphony’s New Website

Posted in New Releases on September 7, 2008 by euphonyjournal

Euphony is a student-run biannual literary journal at the University of Chicago that publishes poetry and prose from writers at the University community and around the country, both accomplished and aspiring. Our Fall and Spring print issues will be co-published on this website, and back-issues are being digitally archived. In addition to our print publications, we will be publishing writing exclusively online. We’re excited about a year-round publishing schedule, and hope you are too.

The navigation bar on the right provides information on joining our staff and submitting work as well as our most recent print publication; more content will appear throughout the quarter. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email euphony@uchicago.edu.

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Fiction: “The Dead Men in the Bushes” by Lisa Burdige

Posted in Fiction on February 8, 2010 by euphonyjournal

There are dead men in the bushes, she thinks, right by where I walk the dog. Dead rich men killed by goblin boys. Thin, wiry boys, strung out on greed and miscellaneous wanga. Breath burned by that crazy smoke. Lips, cracked and dry, marked with tender pipe sores. Smelling a sweet, plumy scent like a cold shiver up your spine. Read more »

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Book Review: Umberto Eco’s “The Infinity of Lists”

Posted in Review on January 28, 2010 by euphonyjournal

Review by Levi Foster
Rizzoli
Hardcover, 408 Pages
November 2009

Umberto Eco is terrifyingly erudite, as anyone who has read his novels will attest: the extravagant wealth of information in his novels, on medieval scholarship, or the Kabbalah, or any of a dozen other subjects, is staggering. And anyone who has read, for example, the six-page-long description of the main door of the church of the abbey in The Name of the Rose will confirm that Eco has a penchant—perhaps even a passion—for the obsessively detailed catalogue. His most recent novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, could with justice be described as an amnesic narrator rattling down through a catalogue of pre-World War II Italian comic books, popular songs, magazines, newspapers, and other relics of his forgotten childhood.

So Eco’s latest book, The Infinity of Lists, a work of non-fiction about lists in literature and art from Homer to Dalí, is at the very least in character. Read more »

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The Winter 2010 Issue is Here!

Posted in New Releases on January 26, 2010 by euphonyjournal

Our Winter issue is available for download here and will be coming from the printer shortly. Pick up a copy anywhere on campus or around Hyde Park. Enjoy!

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Fiction: “May the Road Rise Up to Meet You”

Posted in Fiction on January 19, 2010 by euphonyjournal

I sent my guinea pigs ahead of me with the friend of a friend. He was going to Portland and came to pick them up on Friday afternoon in a corroded green station wagon that was missing a fender. There was barely enough room in the trunk, on account of the mountains of old books, so we had to move half of them to the front seat. We wedged the cage between stacks of Kerouac and Faulkner because I wanted them to feel at home. “The next time we see each other,” I whispered to them before I shut the trunk, “you can tell me all about romanticism.” Read more »

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Home is Where?

Posted in Dispatches from London on December 29, 2009 by euphonyjournal

Laura Stiers is a third year English major studying abroad in London this quarter. In Dispatches from London, she blogs about books, curious Anglicisms, and literary culture in one of Europe’s most literary cities. This post concludes the series.

It’s cold and grey in London today. I’m glad of it, really. If it had been bright and crisp and wintry, like its been for most of the week, I would be finding it even harder to leave. Read more »

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“I Do Love Their Commas”

Posted in Dispatches from London on December 2, 2009 by euphonyjournal

Laura Stiers is a third year English major studying abroad in London this quarter. In Dispatches from London, she blogs about books, curious Anglicisms, and literary culture in one of Europe’s most literary cities.

Winter smells exactly the same here as it does in Chicago. The street outside our residence hall is hung with Christmas lights. We have one week left.

Thanksgiving was spent in Oxford, which I suppose might have been sad, except that Oxford is more or less the Holy Land as far as fantasy literature is concerned. That is to say, The Chronicles of Narnia, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and most importantly to me, The Lord of the Rings were all written here. “City of Dreaming Spires,” indeed. Read more »

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They Do Things Differently There

Posted in Dispatches from London on November 23, 2009 by euphonyjournal

Laura Stiers is a third year English major studying abroad in London this quarter. In Dispatches from London, she blogs about books, curious Anglicisms, and literary culture in one of Europe’s most literary cities.

I’m doing my reading for tomorrow, a British political newspaper from 1931. Bored, I flip to the end to read the advertisements and the “London Amusements” page. There are theater listings, which reminds me: we’re going to a musical tonight. I check my e-mail to make sure I leave on time. I’m seeing Blood Brothers, 7:45 at the Phoenix Theater on Charing Cross Road. I click on the Wikipedia link about the show. Apparently it’s been running continuously in the same theater since 1988. I’ve never heard of it. Read more »

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Poetry: “KJ’s Feet”, by Craig Cotter

Posted in Poetry on November 15, 2009 by euphonyjournal

Not a callous.
Each nail clear.
Cuticles naturally, symmetrically edged.
Scent gets me hard.
Size 12.
Twenty-four.

Every other surface
(dark black hair)
perfect. Perfect scent.

You drink steadily
Absolut Cape Cod

That monstrosity, what’s it called, she said.
The Pomapdour Center?
Yeah that’s it.
Great Rivers cardboard sculpture.

KJ your 6-foot
140 pound twink body
Nothing better in my life.
Only things equal.
The Nobel Prize in Literature
for lifetime achievement
could only equal your body
and sweet nature.
Sitting on the edge of my bed
your feet in white socks and black and white
tennis shoes
telling me about your boys, girls,
computer-animation free-lance.

*
[Take a good long pause here.
Take a half-hour walk or run
or swim—break—
then get back to this poem.
Seriously if you don’t do one
you’ll miss the experience.]
*

Every night I don’t look for you
but about five nights a week.
Looked through Zurich and Pattaya.

Everything disappears!

Not a hair on your chest
or flat stomach.

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I’m In The British Library (And I Feel Fine)

Posted in Dispatches from London on November 5, 2009 by euphonyjournal

Laura Stiers is a third year English major studying abroad in London this quarter. In Dispatches from London, she blogs about books, curious Anglicisms, and literary culture in one of Europe’s most literary cities.

Sylvia Plath has the handwriting of the girl who sat next to me in my eighth grade English class. Looking at the letter in the display case, with its rounded vowels and nicely spaced words, it’s so easy to imagine her writing with a pink gel pen. Doodling flowers in the margins of her notebook. SP ♥ TH. Read more »

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Fiction: “Written on the Wall in Chalk” by Lee Oleson

Posted in Fiction on November 1, 2009 by euphonyjournal

A story of our post-9/11 Great Depression. This piece is an eery and all-too-telling portrait of today’s Americana. —The Editors

The laundry, off a side street, has a small sign over the front door that says Capeti & Brothers. It’s a large, two-story building with no windows. From inside comes the roar of machines. Read more »

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