We have even included some excerpts for you to check out. As you read through the Table of Contents, click on the orange links to catch a glimpse of what this issue holds for you.

Fiction

Rick MoodyThe Reign of Frogs
An excerpt from the novel The Diviners
It’s Monday midday in Santa Monica, and Melody Howell Forvath, writer of novels of international intrigue, doesn’t give a goddamn what anyone thinks.

Tony Earley Yard Art
The plumber she called was a singer, of all things—Arlen Jones, the High Lonesome Plumber—and it was the High Lonesome Plumber who now sat backwards astride her noisy toilet while she leaned against the door jamb and watched.

Amber DermontStella at the Winter Palace
Nowadays, I’m a professional granddaughter. Women pay me to vacation with them.  Part escort, part tour guide. A bit of a nursemaid as well. .

Amy AlbanyThe Ascension of Thin Skin
He lived alone, in apartment 104. He had been there for close to a year.
The boy figured he was the only twelve-year-old in town living by himself.

Mary OtisUnstruck
Pritchard told her they could get jobs as dishwashers at the International House of Pancakes. Pritchard knew an older kid who would get them in. The kid said that lots of children worked there. Nobody minded.

New Voice Poetry

Sarah BartlettCoterminous (4)

New Voice Fiction

Robert TraviesoBouncing
Seth’s mother said, “From here on in, every day, for the rest of my life,
I’m going to be a little bit dumber than the day before, and a little less pretty.”

Paul CohenThe Marks
The ski corporation owned the mountain, and they had about fifteen enforcers, guys with walkie-talkies and shades. They made sweeps looking for people like us—looking for us, I liked to think, because back then living up there was a game.

Poetry

Bin Ramke
But Yeats was ASKED to Write a
Poem About the War    

Rebecca Aronson
Handgun 38
The Question of Fire

Mark Levine
Willow                                

Matthea Harvey
Implications for Modern Life                 

Zack Finch
For Love to Exist 104
History of Accidents 105
Obsolete Knowledge(After Hegel)

Scott Zieher
The God That Sleeps in Museums

Interview

Mark Strand
At the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, Strand joined Christopher Merrill for martinis and a chat about Wallace Stevens, disguising a good literary theft, and giving yourself a few months to figure out what you’ve written.

Pilgrimage

Francisco LetelierThe End of the World
Years after a car bomb killed their father, one son became an artist, the other a political activist. A Chilean-born writer and artist revisits his brother and his home country amid the indictments of the former Pinochet regime.

Essay

Peter LaSalle The Other Life of Any Book
From Cambridge to Cuernavaca, Malcolm Lowry’s novel, Under the Volcano, still resonates.                                

Lost and Found

Chris Behaon Mavis Gallant’s The Collected Stories
Memory should save us from repeating our mistakes, Gallant writes, but it never does.                      

Diana Fox on Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle
The author of The Hundred and One Dalmatians also wrote for grown-ups.              

William Giraldi on Alistair MacLeod’s The Lost Salt Gift of Blood
The dead are never far away in this austere, hypnotic collection.         

Profile             

Karen HudesEpic Agent: The Great Candida Donadio
With an unerring eye for the offbeat, the late agent discovered
Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gaddis.

Readable Feast

Abigail ThomasFilling What’s Empty
Is the author’s refrigerator doomed to barrenness?

The Last Word

Eliot Weinberger Post-National Writers
A spirited call to read, and write, outside of borderlines.