There is a used bookstore in Boston, Commonwealth Books, where I found a collection of stories by a man named Breece D’J Pancake. He died at the young age of 26. There is a black and white portrait of him on the back cover, looking pensively at something outside of the frame, something I’ll never know. Is he writing a story? Reading? Or just simply lost in his own melancholy? These are all of the stories he had written in his short career, in between the yellowed covers of an old West Virginia road and praise of his seemingly singular luminosity. It’s a strange name, Breece D’J Pancake, but I have been looking for good short fiction and on the first page, in his story “Trilobites”, there are already sentiments and regret:

“I see a concrete patch in the street. It’s shaped like Florida, and I recollect what I wrote in Ginny’s yearbook: ‘We will live on mangoes and love.’ And she up and left without me – two years she’s been down there without me. She sends me postcards with alligator wrestlers and flamingos on the front. She never asks me any questions. I feel like a real fool for what I wrote, and go into the café.”

There is the sad refrain of “without me,” echoing vibrantly with the desire to share mangoes and love with someone else. The opening story deals with a search to fill some void of missing satisfaction or lost sentiments. The narrator’s father died and his mother is looking on selling the farm. The narrator has looked for trilobites, an extinct arthropod, but has been unable to find any of those gems. There are his options, but he is unable to know how to make heads or tails with them. There is an inevitability of a future, but where does it lead and how does it involve him?

It’s all a search: writing, reading, and finding new authors who bring some aspect of their own life into your own. Though in contemporary fiction, it’s difficult looking for the authors who have already passed away, like looking into the fiction of some distant ghost. They’re reading to you from beyond the grave. Roberto Bolaño was delivered to the English-speaking world that way. A man decorated with literary awards, yet he died in 2003 of liver failure, two years before New Directions published By Night in Chile. The Savage Detectives has the search for some truth, the author Ceserea Tinajero, and there are the critics looking for Archimboldi in 2666. It’s hardly ever conclusive, but it’s satisfying, much like my own means to look further into the life of who these authors are.

It’s limiting, it’s an eerie feeling at times; people who lived a life so close to my own, but they’re non-existent now. There are only scraps of their past life existing within the present. But reading their literature, they were once impassioned about something at points in their life, be it a craving for some intangible truth or to represent something beyond their hidden knowledge.

That’s what a bulk of the entries for Long River Review entail, young adults clumsily tripping over language to deliver something that is viscerally tangible to them. Yes, it’s not at all perfect. It becomes an eyesore at times. But there are a few that strike the nail on the head, and it becomes as invigorating as finding that strange author’s name in a used bookstore tucked away in Boston. There’s an entire world of books and knowledge out there, waiting to be written, waiting to be read. Even to be a part of that world is most rewarding and challenging. There are all the woes in the publishing world now, but it needs to be its own self-acknowledging phoenix, ready to fall apart and start over again. Literature is not something that will cease existing. There are still all our literary ghosts, but there is always the search ready to be written about, waiting to be read.

Daniel Gregory