Article

  • Voyage

    I feel as if we opened a book about great ocean voyages and found ourselves on a great ocean voyage: sailing through December, around the horn of Christmas and into the January Sea, and sailing on and on in a novel without a moral but one in which all the characters who died in the…

  • Contributors’ Notes

    MASTHEAD Guest Editor Campbell McGrath Editor Don Lee Managing Editor Gregg Rosenblum Poetry Editor David Daniel Associate Fiction Editor Maryanne O’Hara Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O’Malley Assistant Fiction Editor: Jay Baron Nicorvo. Editorial Assistants: Elizabeth Lee and Ashley Joseph O’Shaughnessy. Bookshelf Advisors: Fred Leebron and Cate Marvin. Proofreader: Megan Weireter. Fiction Readers:…

  • Introduction

                         ". . . whence a whole world emerges."—Cavafy A friend of mine finds out from her agent (her editor never calls) that her book, her fourth, has been dropped from her publisher’s catalogue. The work is too difficult. A writer I know is told, "How about putting in some dogs? People love it when…

  • Samurai

    Bruno came up to the girl at the bar and she was already talking halfway out of one side of her mouth while, he knew it, looking at him with one eye at least through the smoke she dropped everywhere from the chatted cigarette and the pointed nails, and he knew it was all falling…

  • Introduction

    The vigor and accomplishment of contemporary American literature is nowhere more easily appreciated than in the journals and quarterlies that labor doggedly, and for the most part thanklessly, to display both the quantity and quality of the enterprise. The quantity and quality of those journals and quarterlies themselves is both staggering and delightful, and the…

  • Contributors’ Notes

    MASTHEAD Guest Editor Amy Bloom Editor Don Lee Managing Editor Gregg Rosenblum Poetry Editor David Daniel Associate Fiction Editor Maryanne O’Hara Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O’Malley Assistant Fiction Editor: Jay Baron Nicorvo. Editorial Assistants: Rachael T. Brown and Emily Carlson. Bookshelf Advisors: Fred Leebron and Cate Marvin. Proofreader: Megan Weireter. Fiction Readers:…

  • The Afterlife

    Here are boys, still weak. When they speak                                                                   snow falls from their lips. Pale of hand and cheek, the motors that whirred in their chests have failed. + Their new city—buildings like a scrim                                                                  a god unfurled for them so it waves in the wind. + Lovely, strange, and chill. The boys are…