Synopses & Reviews
The Riveted issue of Conjunctions explores the world of fixation through previously unpublished fiction, poetry and essays. Compulsion, it seems, is as limitless as the imagination itself. Even the most disciplined among us has at some moment been the spellbound prey of the irresistible, has been influenced by an idee fixe so dynamic and overwhelming as to make life itself shrink into the background. In Riveted, the reader will tour narratives of mesmerists and hoarders, conspiracy theorists and martyrs, fetishists and addicts, saints and sinners. This issue investigates the dynamic, magnetic force known as obsession and how it can reshape us, for better or worse, into people we no longer recognize as ourselves. Several dozen innovative contemporary writers explore this facet of human nature including Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Carroll, Fiona Maazel, Christopher Sorrentino, Peter Gizzi, Dawn Tripp, John Ashbery and many others.