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Joy Castro

Born in Miami, raised in England and West Virginia, and educated in Texas, Joy Castro is the award-winning author of the memoir The Truth Book, two literary thrillers set in post-Katrina New Orleans: Hell or High Water and Nearer Home, the essay collection Island of Bones, and the short fiction collection How Winter Began. Her work has appeared in venues including Ploughshares, Senses of Cinema, Brevity, Fourth Genre, North American Review, Salon, Afro-Hispanic Review, Gulf Coast, and the New York Times Magazine. Winner of the Nebraska Book Award and an International Latino Book Award, Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award, an alternate for the Berlin Prize, editor of the anthology Family Trouble, and a former Writer in Residence at Vanderbilt University, she’s the Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she teaches creative writing, literature, and Latinx studies. Her most recent novel is Flight Risk.

Ein Haus am Meer

By Joy Castro

We’re thrilled to publish an original story from Joy Castro this month. Here’s how she describes this story’s origin: “A couple of years ago. It was my pleasure to view the 1966 short film Ein Haus am Meer (A House by the Sea) privately at the film archive in Oberhausen, Germany with Marco Abel, a noted scholar of German cinema. Unavailable to the public, this nine-minute black-and-white film was an early creation of director Klaus Lemke, an enfant terrible of contemporary German cinema and a key filmmaker in the New Munich Group, a movement that peaked in the 1960s and early 70s.” Although it’s unlikely that many readers will have seen the film, the story’s pacing, mood, and questioning achieve the aim of great ekphrasis: to capture transitory, elusive beauty and communicate its vital energy. Like the film that inspired it, this story moves swiftly from light to dark abyss. Castro would like to dedicate this story to the filmmaker Klaus Lemke.

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The Brooklyn Rail

MARCH 2023

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