Category: Don Webb

Another green world by Henry Wessells, 2025

Another green world by Henry Wessells
a first glimpse in the wild : Another green world (2025)

— Henry Wessells. Another green world. Zagava, 2025. Paperback issue. Pp. 180, [2, blank], [2, imprint]. Sage green wrappers printed in black, lower wrapper with blurbs by Guy Davenport, William Gibson, and Joanne McNeil.
On a very hot evening in late June, your correspondent went to Newark airport to expedite customs clearance and collect the first author copies of Another green world, newly re-issued by Zagava Books with two additional stories. It is a stylish book in a tall narrow format, set by Jan-Marco Schmitz in Minion pro with titles in Roadway.
The paperback is a pleasure to hold and read. The hardcover issue is in production, and a formal  announcement of publication is expected. Zagava make nice books. Perhaps you will agree.

The table of contents is as follows (with note of the story‘s first publication) :

  1. From This Swamp. (The Starry Wisdom. A Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft. Ed. D. M. Mitchell. Creation Books, 1994)
  2. Book Becoming Power. (NYRSF, March 2000)
  3. Another Green World. (Nature, 15 June 2000)
  4. The Polynesian History of the Kerguélen Islands. (Exquisite Corpse 45 & 47, 1994)
  5. The Institute of Antarctic Archaeology & Protolinguistics. (Another green world, 2003)
  6. Appraisal at Edgewood (A Critical Fiction). (NYRSF, March 2001)
  7. Hugh O’Neill’s Goose. (Interzone, October 2001)
  8. Virtual Wisdom. (Exquisite Corpse 36, 1992)
  9. Wulkderk; or, Not in Skeat. (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 32, 2015, as “The Beast Unknown to Heraldry”)
  10. Extended Range; or, The Accession Label. (2015, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 35, 2016)
  11. Ten Bears; or, A Journey to the Weterings (A Critical Fiction). (NYRSF, October 2003)

Of the first edition, Guy Davenport wrote,
“If you don’t believe in magic, read Henry Wessells and find out how wrong you are.”

Joanne McNeil (author of Lurking and Wrong Way), writes, “Henry Wessells writes from beyond an ‘unfamiliar void’, where the natural world, dreams, language, myths, research, and rituals converge. The stories collected in Another Green World offer uncanny vitality out of the dark like dandelions sprouting from cracked New Jersey pavement. A delightful and enduring work of literary inquiry.”

Temporary Culture at 35


TEMPORARY CULTURE started with a photocopy ’zine at the end of June 1988, The Newsletter of Temporary Culture, the title from a dream-memory, and the form and content being a confluence of available technology and literary urges in the post-industrial not-quite-gentrified Hudson river littoral in Paulus Hoek (five minutes’ walk from downtown Jersey City). With the fifth issue the word newsletter fell away from the title and the seventh issue introduced the sumac logo and marked an end to a rainbow of ’zines (the eighth issue never made it to the copy machine).

the cover of the first issue, light blue, was a rubbing of a coal chute cover in front of a house on Van Voorst Park in Jersey City

And then the world changed.

Temporary Culture evolved with the newly available technology just as my interest in Avram Davidson ripened to the point of publication, and a friend said, you don’t really want a database, let’s make a website. An electronic newsletter followed, but the itch to produce printed things resurfaced before long, first with the publications of the Avram Davidson Society, and then from 2003 a steady series of books, including Another green world, When They Came by Don Webb,  Hope-in-the-Mist by Michael Swanwick, and the specially bound copies of A Conversation larger than the Universe. (In retrospect, it would have been cool to accept the hand press and founts of type offered to me in late 1992 or early 1993, but at the time I had nowhere to house them and so a different path was chosen.) The most important book published by Temporary Culture is without a doubt Sexual Stealing by Wendy Walker; the most elegant is the hand printed edition of Naples by Avram Davidson. Of each one of these (and of each of the books of Temporary Culture) I can assert that without my energies these books would not have come into being. A checklist of the publications of Temporary Culture is in preparation. There will probably be a few more books before it’s over. [HWW]