ISSUES | summer 2023

Status  Charles McGrath has written about the American novel echoing the British themes of status—position, wealth, or class—focusing on the position of women, for example, or the class ladder or…    read more

Dead Animals  Becky Mandelbaum  The summer after my first year of college, I needed an abortion, so I landed a job dog-sitting for this fancy lady from my synagogue, Ms.…    read more

Last Supper  John Fulton   It was a sunlit evening in early spring when Daniel and Marian boarded the tram to the Renklis to share one last dinner with them. Frau…    read more

Mothers  Emily Mitchell  The last thing I do when I finish work each morning is bring out the Mothers. I go to the small side entrance of the temperature-controlled room…    read more

Sorrow Corner  Naeem Murr  Most tourists mistake us for Speakers’ Corner, those blowhards at the other end of Hyde Park. No one here speaks. Wearable sandwich boards are not light,…    read more

The Donym  Jonathan Wei  There are many people who will argue that the Donym is not, in fact, a book—and I, by the standards to which I have adhered for…    read more

“Oh you think you bad, huh?”  For my brotha, D  This crazy white boy Sam ran up on my giant goofy friend and slammed his huge baseballer forearm against his…    read more

Receiving Angel A boy fell asleep in the yard making snow angels and woke many years later a man. When he stood, the wings were frozen to his back and…    read more

Motherhood in the Climate Crisis means my womb is a bomb I choose to wield. Violence precipitates peace, according to every revolution. After acid precipitation fells each chestnut tree, I…    read more

Naff  A Rumination on Taste and Tastelessness  Grace Plowden  Last summer I went on a Hinge date with a guy from New Jersey. We sat outside a Williamsburg restaurant that…    read more

Language  Kathleen Spivack  “Bette, Bette, why isn’t the child speaking proper German?” my grandfather grumbled at my mother. Outside, the apple trees were in bloom. Huge puffy clouds floated in…    read more

She’s Got It: Creating Clara Bow  In 1926, B. P. Schulberg, the head of productions at Paramount Pictures, read British author Elinor Glyn’s novelette It in Cosmopolitan. It is the…    read more

Vanitas: The Art of Death and Decay  Kristine Somerville  Last fall, while driving home for lunch, I turned a corner and spotted a dead raccoon on the side of the…    read more

From the Margins to the Mainstream: Gay Life in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries  Dan Stahl   How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones. Simon & Schuster, 2019,…    read more