Tin House :: Back Issues : Issue 3

Temptation
Winter 2000, Vol. 1 No. 3

Issue 3

FICTION

Amy Hempel

BEACH TOWN
"I didn't have to hide to listen."

Mian Mian

An excerpt from CANDY
"I am every mother's nightmare."

John Sanford

An excerpt from A PALACE OF SILVER
"But most painful, most piercing, was a sight of what she'd worn."

Lisa Zeidner

CHOSEN PEOPLE
"To commit a sexual act in the face of death was therefore not sacrilege but sanctimony."

J. Robert Lennon

MAILMAN
"Words like 'mail fraud' and 'mandatory sentencing' pass through my mind."

NEW VOICES

Fiction: James Conrad

ROAD
"A high-school English teacher only has so many chances in life to get out, and I took mine the moment it came."

Poetry: Chin Ho Chong

SMOKE

POETRY

Pattiann Rogers

STONE BIRD

Yehuda Amichai

ALL THE MOTIONS AND POSITIONS

LIFE IS CALLED LIFE

AND WHAT IS MY LIFE SPAN?

Nicholas Christopher

from 1972

Marge Piercy

VANITY, VANITY

Ed Ochester

CHICKADEE

David Lehman

FEBRUARY 28

APRIL 4

Celia Gilbert

FOR THE BEES

INTERVIEWS/PROFILES

CRUEL CITIES
Jonathan Napack profiles China's "Poster Child for Spiritual Pollution," the Chinese Gen-X cult sensation Mian Mian, author of "Candy" (excerpted elsewhere in this issue), who is openly transgressive both in her personal life and on the page.

MEMORIES OF THE GROUP THEATRE
The final, never-before-published interview with Dawn Powell, one of the greatest comic novelists of the twentieth century, on her ill-fated collaboration with Stella Adler and the Group Theatre in 1932. Introduction by Tim Page, Powell's biographer and the man responsible for bringing Powell back into the public eye.

VISITING MR. SANFORD
Neil Gordon profiles John Sanford, the ninety-four-year-old contemporary of Nathanael West, a prolific realist and out-spoken leftist known for his defiance of McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee.

PILGRIMAGES

Charles Simic

THE DEVIL IS A POET
The poet ventures to Lisbon's Museu de Arte Antiga to lose himself in the surreal universe of the sixteenth-century triptych "The Temptation of Saint Anthony."

Lynne Tillman

DESPERATELY SEEKING JANE AND PAUL BOWLES
Swirling sands, camels, vicious lovers, the Bowleses had it all going on. Tillman goes in search of father figure Paul Bowles.

LOST & FOUND

Frank Bures on the lost brother, Shiva Naipul. V. S. Naipaul won the war of sibling rivalry on the battleground of fame and letters. But was his younger brother Shiva the better writer?

Gerald Howard on The Honey Badger, by Robert Ruark. This vivid portrait of a suave 1950s literary cad finds the author's self-important alter-ego, Alec Barr, gliding through life with enviable ease and panache.

Robert Polito on Michael Edward's Priscilla, Elvis and Me: In the Shadow of the King. In his memoir, Edwards—a vainglorious ex-model and former Priscilla Presley boy toy—proves that his obsession with the King is as grand as his obsession with himself.

John Frederick Moore dusts off David Bradley's 1981 PEN/Faulkner Award winner The Chaneysville Incident, which tells the powerful story of a black historian on a quest to uncover the buried evil of his hometown.

Sallie Tisdale on Robert Paul Smith's Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing. The charming, pitch-perfect 1958 children's classic is still as sharp and relevant as the day it was written.

Eddie Little lauds Alex Abella's The Killing of the Saints. Raymond Chandler with a Latin beat, this fast-paced, hard-boiled mystery follows two Cuban practitioners of Santeria accused of a cold-blooded massacre in Los Angeles's Hispanic community.

A READABLE FEAST

Sara Perry

THE APPLE OF THEIR EYES
Sara Perry finds that Jane Austen, Alice B. Toklas, and Erskine Caldwell all baked a mean apple pie.

THE LAST WORD

Benjamin Anastas

SICK ART
The author is truly revolted by art form from around the world.

PORTFOLIO

Desert Citizens, by Mark Klett