The first story, though actually it is more prose poem than fiction, is ‘Destination’ by Carol Novack and opens with a painting of a town standing on an easel, though the reality of the actual town differs from this image, bringing to mind Magritte’s painting ‘The Human Condition’, with its suggestion that the world is essentially unknowable, all we have are interpretations and/or representations. And, as far as I can tell, this theme carries over into Novack’s text, with the protagonist always searching for something that never measures up to his memories/expectations. It is, and almost certainly intended to be, a frustratingly intangible piece, but evocative and beautifully written, the kind of work calculated to reward repeated reading.

Complete with opening quote from Foucault, Fabian Delecto’s ‘Re’ addresses that old philosophical conundrum of the Soul/Body divide. Our hero is sitting in his favourite bar and minding his own business when the repo men turn up to take back his body, which he hasn’t been putting to much use. It’s a fascinating concept, and Delecto runs with it entertainingly enough for a few pages. The prose radiates a gritty cyber noir sensibility, with sleazy imagery and a wisecrack never more than a slip away, but enjoyable as it all is there’s also a sense of lost opportunity, that the idea had more potential than this treatment allows.

Upon reading the first paragraph about a man hiding outside his own home and spying on himself I immediately expected the worst, but Ian Shoebridge’s ‘The Anti-Self’ owes more to work such as Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ than Schwarzenegger vehicle ‘The 6th Day’, which was my first thought. Backtracking, Ricardo starts to receive e-mails from himself and this is the harbinger of a division of self, his personality splitting down the middle amoeba like, each of the two new Ricardos gifted with distinct traits and associations of the original, Self and Anti-Self made manifest. So far, so good, and this is engagingly clever stuff, with Shoebridge playing riffs on themes of identity, personality and the reintegration of the self, deftly setting the stage for some possibly cataclysmic meeting of opposites. What spoils it somewhat is the resolution, the story simply coming to a stop, with a rather unwieldy info dump come philosophy lecture tagged on, and an awkward shift of perspective so that one of the characters is directly addressing the reader.

‘Praying for the Dead’ is a typical D. Harlan Wilson story, insofar as there is such a thing, quirky and highly individualistic, taking us within the confines of a nursing home for the obese and twisting reality through the full 360 degrees. I’m not quite sure how this fits in with the doppelganger theme, but there’s a queasy joy to be taken in the lurid imagery and vein of black humour that runs through this piece like the words Made in Blackpool through a stick of rock.

The story from Mark Howard Jones, ‘Pig on the Beach’, is somewhat mundane by comparison, at least in its initial stages, but reality is soon left far behind as a man attempting to leave his old life (and girlfriend) behind relocates to a small seaside town only to find himself bearing witness to a horrific and surreal scene on the local beach. The writing is deft and assured, the characterisation compelling and the shift from common ground to some other dimension of arch weirdness is achieved with real skill, but the somewhat forced identification of exterior events with the viewpoint character’s emotional landscape, if that’s what the writer is trying to put over, doesn’t quite come off and ultimately what the story has to offer is its own sense of the bizarre.

Weighing in at ten pages, ‘The Rape’ by Ralph Robert Moore is the longest story here and also the best of what’s on offer, like Robert Coover’s classic tale of shifting perspectives, ‘The Babysitter’, it turns the reader into part voyeur, inviting us to examine our own attitude to matters of sex and violence, with viewpoint passing from one character to another like a baton in a relay race. A man is hiding in the bushes and watching two other men rape a woman, getting off on that, but then the viewpoint changes and we’re off on another tangent altogether, with an almost Keystone Kops sensibility intruding as two naked men chase each other round town, and then the real cops get involved with unforeseen consequences. It’s an accomplished and eminently clever story, one that is meticulously plotted and realised in a way that constantly wrong foots the reader, forcing us to continually re-evaluate what is happening as new information is provided and questioning our ability to make sense of what we are told, and with an ending that, ouroboros like, seems to turn back upon itself and swallow its own tail.

Publishing a serial is a risky undertaking, particularly in a magazine that appears quarterly. There is a danger of readers losing the plot and the cannier will wait until all the parts are in print and then read it as a whole, the way in which the author intended. Certainly it’s too early to say anything useful about ‘Keeping Angels’ by Cameron Pierce, part two of which appears in this issue of Sein. On current evidence it’s looking very much like the work of a Burroughs wannabe, though that impression could be due to nothing more than the presence of cockroaches in the story, complete with gonzo plotline and cryptic exchanges of speech as dialogue, but the jury will have to remain out for the moment on whether this is the real deal or simply more new clothes for the emperor.

‘Off Centre’ by the magazine’s co-editor, Rachel Kendall is, to over-simplify, a witty and engaging examination of artistic tension, the dichotomy between the Apollonian and Dionysian, here rendered as a clash/dialogue between the sensual and sensation craving WOMAN and the more controlled VOICE, with its overwhelming need to translate raw experience into art, Kendall herself providing an authorial voice over, comedic and knowing, inviting the reader to both laugh at and share in these creative pretensions.

Perspective is a theme returned to in Marc Lowe’s ‘The Third Person’, perhaps the most experimental piece in this issue and representative of the kind of work that might not find a home without magazines such as Sein. The viewpoint character records events in the room in which he sits, meticulously describing what happens and adding footnotes, all of which hint at the unreliability of language and our senses, before a paradigm shift in which, from being the observer he becomes the observed, with questions raised about his sanity and whether the world described exists anywhere except inside the head of a mental patient. The end result is a bizarre and slightly chilling account of obsession, one that asks as many questions as it answers, and is all the more powerful for its ambiguity.

Illustration, though thin on the ground is an important part of Sein und Werden’s remit. ‘Rose is a Rose’ by Rachel Kendall, a manipulated photograph of a rose tattooed on a woman’s breast reminiscent of an ink drawing made dual by folding, is an ideal accompaniment to Craig Caudill’s prose poem ‘Rose’, a work that crackles with energy, celebrating woman as archetypal goddess, whore and muse. John Brewer’s stand alone ‘Number 28’, two seemingly identical figures standing in front of double doors and with a sense that they are melting into the background, has echoes of such things as ‘The Blues Brothers’ and robots or mannequins, but ultimately is not reduced by the labels you hang on it, has to be accepted on its own terms as eerie and mysterious, the ghost(s) in the machine. Sein co-editor Spyros Heniadis contributes ‘Imminent Darkness’, a moody and evocative photograph of a man’s head (possibly a self-portrait).

Accompanying the Heniadis photograph is one of his poems, ‘Left Right’, a sparky snapshot of duality/opposition, with the wonderful (and appropriate) last line ‘The only surety being confusion.’ Other poems include Daniel Y. Harris’ bittersweet threnody ‘The Bone’ and the darkly rococo and decadent word storm that is Juliet Cook’s ‘Maybe My Muse is a Devilfish’. My personal favourite though is ‘Renegade Soul’ by J. E. Stanley capturing the contradiction between who we are and who we wish to be.

Sein und Werden is a magazine that takes risks and revels in being different. Certainly won’t be to everybody’s taste, but full credit to the editors for giving a home to quirky prose, poetry and artwork of this kind, and chances are if you’re willing to take a chance on the magazine you will find something, probably many things, to delight and disturb, amaze and amuse, to challenge your expectations of what literature and art should be. Recommended.