New Work by Former Guest Editors
Charles Baxter, Blood Test: a Comedy (Pantheon, 2024)
Nonfiction
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Introduction
So much in this world we can’t make better. So much in this world we can’t understand. For those reasons, literature sustains us. We need, more than ever, language that expands human perception, that opens us to the broken world. We need the compassion and outrage and tenderness and horror of language that nibbles at…
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Vivian and Me, Just Before Falling
Vivian is still alive when it happens, sitting alone in Chicago on a far northside park bench overlooking Lake Michigan, as the storage war hipsters start selling her photographs. I have not seen pictures of her sitting there, but imagine a faded blousy dress, the scratched bench, the spray of waves against the broken revetment…
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Introduction: Clarity and Surprise
Almost weekly, I exchange drafts of poems with a friend, and we discuss them over the phone. He lives in Cambridge, and I’m in a fifteenth-floor apartment in Manhattan. My desk looks across West End Avenue to a building where men prepare to restore the facade. One leans over the railing of a steel scaffold,…
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Mother’s Colors (Emerging Writers’ Contest Winner: NONFICTION)
In nonfiction, our winner is Billy Lezra, for their piece “Mother’s Colors.” This year’s nonfiction judge was Augusten Burroughs. Of the essay, he writes: “The writer deftly brings a lifetime of trauma and fractured communication with their mother into focus with gorgeous writing and sharp details, skillfully drawing a Madrid neighborhood as a character as…
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Sharps & Flats
When I was seven years old, my parents noticed I had perfect pitch and could play almost anything by ear, so they started me on piano lessons. But I had trouble with my fingers: they were somehow never independent and my struggles to keep from bending two at a time made my wrists tighten. I…
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New Work by Former Guest Editors
Martín Espada, Jailbreak of Sparrows, poems (Knopf, April 2025) Jay Neugeboren, After Camus, a novel (Madville Publishing, 2024) Jay Neugeboren, Whatever Happened to Frankie King, a graphic novel illustrated by Eli Neugeboren (Graphic Mundi, 2024)
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Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors
Robert Boswell recommends Big Time, by Rus Bradburd (Etruscan Press, 2024). “This novel is hilarious. A university has given up the pretense and is openly run by college sports, leaving professors to haggle over the rights to concessions at the big games—which is how they fund their departments. I laughed aloud maybe twenty times. Like…
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Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors
Margot Livesey recommends Stranger from Across the Sea, by Regina McBride (Green City Books, 2024). “As soon as Violet O’Halloran arrives at St. Dymphna’s School and meets the blind girl, Indira Sharma, I was captivated by this evocative novel set in Ireland and New York. McBride’s characters are so full of longing and passion and I couldn’t wait…