SILVER CURRENT PRESS

Vol. I · A Literary Gathering Room

Currents

A drawing-room of letters from the literary deep.

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

— Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak, 27 January 1904

Currents is the press’s gathering room. A place for thoughts on the writers we keep returning to — Joyce, Woolf, Fitzgerald, O’Connor, Hemingway, and the long company of writers they made possible — and on the books, sentences, and questions of craft we find worth talking about. Some entries are short. Some are longer. None pretend to be definitive. They are conversation.

What you will find here:

  • Reflections on the writers we return to — the classics, the moderns, the rooms they made.
  • Notes on the writing life — questions of craft, problems of form.
  • Editorial counsel — advice from the desk on revision, voice, and patience.
  • Recommended reading — books we believe deserve a careful audience.
  • Letters from readers — your own thoughts, selected and lightly edited.

By writing to Currents, you grant Silver Current Press a non-exclusive, perpetual right to edit your letter for length and clarity and to publish it on this site and in related Silver Current Press materials, with the attribution you specify. You confirm the work is your own and retain copyright in it. We do not pay contributors; selection is its own honor.

I · MMXXVI · April

Fitzgerald, at the Edge of a Sentence

By the Editors

The ending of “Babylon Revisited” is one of the great quiet endings in American fiction. Fitzgerald, who rewrote the final paragraph more than once, refuses the consolations a lesser writer would have reached for. There is no flourish, no rounding image. The widowed Charlie Wales is left alone in a Paris bar at Christmas, and the prose declines to comfort him.

What does the grief’s work is the moral instrument of the sentence itself — short clauses, plain nouns, the slow turning of the comma. We come back to Fitzgerald not for the parties. We come back for the restraint at the end of the room.

— The Editors

II · MMXXVI · February

A Book Worth Knowing

By the Editors

If you have not read William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, set aside the hundred and thirty-five pages it will ask of you and give them gladly. It is the story of a murder on an Illinois farm in 1921 and of a boy who, fifty years later, is still trying to write down what he should have said to another boy at school.

What makes the novel a quiet masterpiece is Maxwell’s willingness to admit, on the page, the limits of his own knowing. He invents what he cannot remember; he says so plainly when he does. The book becomes a confession of how we tell the stories of people we have failed.

It is a small book. We have given copies to more friends than any other novel on the shelf. Each has come back grateful.

— The Editors

Currents is curated by James Mulhern. Selected entries appear quarterly. Letters not selected are read with care and gratitude. The Letters from Readers feature will appear once correspondence is received.

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