A version of the modern mind: long drives, flat landscapes, trees close up (the present) or far against the horizon (the past) and fences strung tight as the future, middle distance. The effect of distance on the slow movement of landscape past the traveler, this variorum of the present: the family on long trips to…
In large measure, Paul Ruffin's short story, "The Fox," speaks for itself. It accomplishes what a well-made short story should, and it goes a step further and satisfies the reader with the sense that this particular author's window into his characters' lives tells its brief tale completely. I feel obliged, however, to endorse this story…
I met Noy Holland six years ago at a writers' conference at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where Barry Hannah wild man stories were still rife, though he had been gone from there a couple of years. The title of the conference was Voicelust, and Tuscaloosa, lush with boredom, marital breakup, dog racing, the…
The organ donor who smiles in the leathery dark of my wallet from a driver's license has already struck one woman— elderly, confused— who stumbled off a Somerville curb one January dusk and became a sickening thump, then a bleeding body cradled in the driver's arms until police and ambulance came. That old woman lived…
From where she was sitting at the kitchen table, her hands deep in the ball of dough in a green bowl, she could see him cross the creek beyond the lower pasture and angle up toward the house. He stopped to lean on the fence that bordered the remains of the summer garden, where the…
There are four of them: Rick and MaryAnn, Molly and Molly's father, MaryAnn's ex. His name is Art. He is a gangly man with a reddish beard and a face that is slightly off kilter. Even on the river he smokes constantly and flicks the butts of his cigarettes into the brown, swift water. They…
What can I learn from the hummingbird, a big thing like me? I hardly have time to study its flash, its momentous iridescence, before it disappears into the mimosa, sated with nectar. I admire the way the greenery trembles. I remember reading that this bird is never sated—its whole miniature life an exercise in digestion….
Born in Nebraska, Cathy Carr has lived in North Carolina all through the 1980's. She took her undergraduate degree at Duke University and lists the writer-in-residence there, Mr. Reynolds Price, as a major influence on her thought and writing. She is a recent graduate of the Creative Writing M.F.A. program at the University of North…
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue George Garrett Assistant Director / Managing Editor Jennifer Rose Associate Fiction Editor / Office Manager Don Lee Thanks this issue to: Mariette Lippo, Robert Soorian and our interns Richard Chetwynd, Bonnie Greenberg, Penny Kline, Nadia Sahely and Cathy Willmott. CONTRIBUTORS Madison Smartt Bell is…
No products in the cart.