Article

Solitude

It was January, I’d hardly seen anyone for days, you understand. The sheep were all sitting separate and silent, a hard wind was coming in over the hill, a white moon floated. I’d bought the pumpkin for soup. My arms had dropped with the weight of it, dropped and come back, like the bounce back…

About Amy Bloom

Although the virtuosity of her prose announces her as a serious author indeed, Amy Bloom is too sensible—and too funny—to get carried away with herself. A relative latecomer to the art, Bloom has written two acclaimed story collections, a novel, and a book of nonfiction essays; she contributes to top-drawer magazines, including The New Yorker,…

New Habits

You’ve made me your horse, and I don’t mind. When you leave town at midnight, debts unpaid and a hard wind lifting the dust out of your hair, I’ll take up new habits: whistling, chewing my nails. Bank robbery’s not so bad when you think about it. Outside my window the pin oak hisses and…

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…