Mark Jacobs New Short Story in Hudson Review (Paraguay)
A well written, timely article as I'd expect from Mark Jacobs. Timely because northern Mali is undergoing growing level of…
Mark Jacobs (Paraguay 1978-80) Mark was the winner of the 1998 Peace Corps Writers Maria Thomas Award for his 
novel Stone Cowboy. A former Foreign Service officer, he has published more than 100 stories in magazines including The Atlantic, The Southern Humanities Review, The Idaho Review, The Southern Review, and The Kenyon Review. His story “How Birds Communicate” won the Iowa Review Fiction Prize in 1998. His five books include three novels and two collections of short stories.
His website can be found at http://www.markjacobsauthor.com.
Click here and read: Bear’s Change
“The Hudson Review is rare in having remained a forum for intelligent, well-written criticism and cultural commentary on a broad spectrum of topics. In fact it belongs to a tiny handful of magazines where the first criterion of inclusion is literary merit.”
— The Wall Street Journal
Founded in 1948, The Hudson Review is a quarterly magazine of literature and the arts published in New York City. Frederick Morgan, one of its founding editors, edited the magazine for its first fifty years. Paula Deitz has been the editor since 1998.
Since its beginning, the magazine has dealt with the area where literature bears on the intellectual life of the time and on diverse aspects of American culture. It has no university affiliation and is not committed to any narrow academic aim or to any particular political perspective. The magazine serves as a major forum for the work of new writers and for the exploration of new developments in literature and the arts. It has a distinguished record of publishing little-known or undiscovered writers, many of whom have become major literary figures. Each issue contains a wide range of material including: poetry, fiction, essays on literary and cultural topics, book reviews, reports from abroad, and chronicles covering film, theatre, dance, music and art. The Hudson Review is distributed in twenty-five countries.
Click here and read: Bear’s Change
A well written, timely article as I’d expect from Mark Jacobs. Timely because northern Mali is undergoing growing level of violence from the Bokoharam–the the tension between Christians and Muslims increase there and around the world—the author refers to, “Coexistence was an evil flower, to be denied sunlight, water, anything a plant needed to thrive…”
He also depicts the tensions between missionaries in a predominately Muslim country–I witnessed this first hand in Sierra Leone. The missionary in this story surprises everyone when he said of one young Muslim patient, “We will respect the boy’s faith” which quelled the concerns of the boys family and his friend and co-worker Mariam observes, “Mali has change you, Tueur d’ours.”
The bitterness of young Muslim men was well told in one passage, “….They lacked work. They lacked a future, a map, a destination. They were hungry for more, far different, for better. All this while Muslims across the world, were being murdered for their faith. They had had enough…”
The ending includes an interesting twist as basic humanity overcomes the danger and havoc surrounding the missionaries.