November 2009
6 posts
About Issue No.1 →
All the pieces in this issue, our very first, were inspired by or gathered through the common theme of “Survival.”
Call for Submissions. →
CANDOR magazine is accepting submissions for its second issue.
CANDOR publishes work by people of all sexes and genders. Its debut issue, themed SURVIVAL, included an essay about the rhetoric of rape victims by Atossa Abrahamian, a personal essay about domesticity by Shashi Bhat, and a conversation entitled “Woman Writer / Writer Mother” between Sarah Manguso and the writer ...
PRESS →
Candor Magazine in THE MILLIONS!
“The debut issue of Candor magazine is like a Sassy for the intellectual set, rife with wit (Emily Gould and Merisa Meltzer discuss Away We Go), intelligence (writer mother Rachel Zucker and woman writer Sarah Manguso speak candidly about identity, motherhood, women’s prejudices and writing), and women’s rights (Atossa Abrahamian considers the rhetoric of...
The Believers by Zoe Heller, reviewed by Mina...
The Believers
Zoe Heller
Zoe Heller isn’t out to make friends. The Believers, her latest novel, is populated with jerks, weaklings, and fools. Nearly all of her characters are difficult to sympathize with, and at times seem intentionally designed to alienate the reader.
That’s the point, says Heller. The author has in numerous interviews critiqued the reader’s desire for...
The Year of Men: An Expat in China, by Adriane...
The Year of Men:
An Expat in China
Names have been changed to protect friendships.
I lived in Hong Kong half a year and no men kissed me, and I thought it would be like this forever. I thought this is what life would be: Me, overdressed, drunk and bleary, sucking on chocolate soy-milk as I made my way in heels to my solitary apartment—a third story walkup above a store where shirtless men...
Everything Had Changed, but Nothing was Different,...
I
In the wake of her grandmother’s death, Grace and her father find a dozen cups of urine, plastic and red, like remnants of a frat party, scattered around the assisted-living apartment Beatrice has occupied for the past six months. The cups are everywhere — beneath the bed, lined up neatly in the hall closet, left absently by the kitchen sink, or on the lid of a dusty toilet. The...
October 2009
5 posts
Woman Writer + Writer Mother: A Conversation...
Our ages, educations, professions, resumes, and mailing addresses are similar, but Sarah has no offspring and Rachel has three sons. This one difference seems more than any other quality to establish and absolutely separate our private and public identities as women, as writers, and as human beings.
In an attempt to understand why, we corresponded over several months.
*
SM: I want to ask...
Emily Gould and Marisa Meltzer discuss AWAY WE GO
Note: This discussion took place months ago, when Candor hoped to launch. Neither Emily Gould nor Marisa Meltzer are weirdly fixated on Away We Go, for the record. emily: Showered! Dressed! I mean “dressed” is defined pretty loosely marisa: I define it as wearing a bra. “real clothes” means I am not wearing elastic waist pants. emily: I hardly have any underwire ones. I...
Domestic Things, by Shashi Bhat
I am dating again – well, the one date, with a man who didn’t ask me any questions about myself. It ruined the pace of things. I had to maintain a constant brainstorm of conversation topics, mostly replicating material from his profile – falsified – he’d lied about his height. “What do you do for a living?”, “Where are you from originally?”, “Do you drink much coffee?” I asked, and he said...
The Case for Survival, by Atossa Abrahamian
1.
In the beginning, there were only victims. A raped woman was a worthless one – robbed of her virginity, stripped of her dignity, mentally and physically scarred and possibly even pregnant outside of wedlock, the rapist could alter the woman’s life for the worse in a matter of moments.
Today, in the West, we think of rape primarily as a psychological trauma. But traditionally, the...
Single, by Lisa Locascio
SINGLE
BY LISA LOCASCIO
RITUALS
Stella’s first months of being single after the end of her seven-year relationship were structured through a series of ceremonial gestures. She and her now-ex-boyfriend had begun dating when she was in her last year of high school and continued through the first year of her coursework for an MFA in poetry. The strange new world of singlehood seemed a sort...