Alice Mattison�s �The Bad Jew� is for me one of the strongest pieces in this issue. �For one year, at fourteen, I went to synagogue. I liked a ceremony during which the rabbi carried the Torah up and down the aisles, but on the whole I was restless, vocal with objections. My parents had joined the temple at my request, but didn�t go there; presently their membership lapsed. To them religion was a simple matter: we were Jewish, we should always say we were Jewish, we should eat traditional Jewish foods along with our ham and shellfish, and that was enough.�

But religion is not a simple matter, and Mattison successfully illustrates the dilemmas of a secular Jew and her ambivalent views of a god that would allow a young work colleague to die in an accident, or allow someone like Hitler to come to power. The story is beautifully written with vivid characterisation.

Katherine Vaz�s �The Love Life of an Assistant Animator� is another fine story in an issue of fine stories. It begins with the narrator telling us that naked images of women are sometimes sneaked into films. It might be a single frame that doesn�t register consciously on the viewer, but even cartoons are affected. The narrator knows this because he is an animator. In fact, he�s an artist who falls into animation and then falls out again when he�s blamed for one of these naked images appearing in a film. Too gifted at his job, he�s been set up, but not before the boss�s wife has caught his attention. An older woman, she possesses The Voice, vocalising cartoon characters. She has an anonymous kind of fame, though she attempts to break into mainstream film acting. She and the narrator maintain infrequent and tenuous contact over the years, sharing a mutual attraction that seems to be cursed with bad timing. �The Love Life of an Assistant Animator� is one of the longer stories in Glimmer Train 56, and grips from beginning to end. It�s beautifully told and contains interesting details and well drawn characters. It�s also more complicated than the summary here might suggest.

Oliver Broudy�s �The Brief� was another favourite. Here the male narrator is a law student, a conservative type who encounters a young female immigrant from the former Yugoslavia. She is rebellious, to the point that she sees the potential for revolution everywhere. The narrator is meanwhile guilty of certain American conformist ways of thinking. The characters are almost polarised in their outlooks, and yet the narrator finds her fascinating. He also has an urge to commit a crime, to get it out his system, perhaps to break out of his conformist life, even just once. And he gets his desire in the end. There�s some wonderfully ironic writing in this story, especially in relation to legal language and some of the briefs the narrator has to look through. This is definitely a story worth checking out.

Matt Bondurant�s ��Telemetry�, on the other hand, has an enigmatic heart. Here the main character likes to listen to short wave radio where signals are bounced across the planet through repeater stations and low-level satellite links. Many stations give off strange noises that barely change over many years. One woman somewhere around the South China Sea has been transmitting number sequences for decades for completely unknown reasons. The plot mostly follows the day-to-day activities of the radio enthusiast, and his new job as a debt collector working for the Pink Mafia. He gets to wear designer clothes and threaten defaulters or those who haven�t paid their rents. There is also a local policeman gunning for him after he beat up their relative. But it�s the radio theme (which also gives the story its title) that really takes �Telemetry� into another realm, leaving a mystery in the reader�s mind long after they�ve finished reading, and a curiosity to hear some of these strange transmissions.

�The Names of Our Many Misfortunes� by Allyson Goldin is a multi-viewpoint story which the writer (in her bio) says she tried to change, worried that the multiple perspectives might not work. In fact, they do work, and round out the story in a way a single perspective would not. The main character is looking back to 1942, and a local meeting related to the war. His family prepare to attend, getting dressed, arguing, and their thoughts, feelings, backgrounds, and worries emerge in the different threads. This is another work with fine characterisation and a beautiful understatement. It has a poignant ending too.

Sallie Bingham�s �Oh Beautiful City of Dreams� follows a woman over the decades in a concisely written and prize winning work. �Wormwood� by Jimmy Olsen is about an expatriate American couple living in a Latin American country and like almost all the fiction in Glimmer Train 56 is very much rooted in the real world and everyday experience. �Emile� by Lucia Nevai impressed me on first reading, and touches on the war in Iraq, though as with the other works in this magazine, there is so much more to it than that.

�Frankie D� by Abby Frucht contains a sensitive and understated character study in the form of the narrator�s grandmother. She�s not the only character in the story, for this is a work with interweaving threads. But the character of Gayle is particularly well handled, as are her relationships with her grandson, her two husbands and her dog, Frankie D himself, who actually appears very little, and yet ties the story together and is the catalyst for Gayle�s poignant declaration towards the end.

George Makana Clark�s �The Story-Ghost� has a very different location to most of the other works, adding another rich thread to the tapestry of stories in Glimmer Train 56. There�s the same strong characterisation, with a tapeworm-afflicted local diviner being particularly memorable.

Gina Ochsner�s �A Cloud For A Carpet� is the very first story in the magazine and winner of Glimmer Train�s Fiction Open Award. It stands out from the others in its confident departure from realism, which includes some excellent description. A tunnel behind a cupboard leads to a strange landscape full of abandoned possessions, wandering dogs, a graveyard, and beyond that, what appear to be the gates of Heaven.

Added to all of this there�s a fascinating interview with Frederick Reiken, a writer I�m not familiar with, and a piece on Mamadali Makmudov, a writer imprisoned in Uzbekistan. He�s currently on Amnesty International�s Prisoners of Conscience list, and the article urges those interested to write letters of support.

Glimmer Train is without question one of the finest literary journals I�ve come across. Text layout gives stories room to breathe, and the book is a pleasure to hold in the hands. On the evidence of this one issue, Glimmer Train specialises in elegantly written, reflective, and psychologically astute literary stories. These are mature, quietly sophisticated works of fiction which take their time to develop and which readers can savour at their leisure. There are no cheap tricks, and none of the writers are guilty of writing controversial material that serves merely to promote their own fame or ego (a fault many other writers are guilty of). It could be argued that the stories in Glimmer Train 56 are quite traditional in style, particularly as far as the North American short story is concerned. But Glimmer Train�s authors know what they�re doing, and manage to hold the reader�s attention right to the very end.

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.