From Our Staff | July 15, 2010

The advanced copy of the summer issue just arrived on our doorstep. Which means your copy will be shipping in the next few days.  We hope that it goes this week, but we hit a bit of a snafu with the boxes.  Typically, our issues are 192 pages, but this action packed ditty has 208 pages, which means our mailer needed to find slightly larger boxes than normal, hence, a short delay.

(Digression: My buddy Dave and I love baseball. Whenever we’re at a game and it’s tied after nine innings, one of us yells “Free baseball!”  One of the beauties of baseball is that it is a timeless game: there is no clock so the game ends only at its own pace. Some sports fans, of course, don’t like this and wish the game was faster. Not us. Now, of course, “Free Literature!” doesn’t have quite the same ring, but hey, you get the idea …)

Our summer issue is titled “Crash.”  We have new fiction by Wade Ostrokwski, Becky Adnot Hayes, Devin Murphy, and Nathan Hogan’s first published story, “The Church at Yavi.”  Our essays are M.C. Armstrong’s fascinating look at Ken and Faye Kesey’s life after the death of their son in a school bus accident, and Sharon Solwitz’s examination of her struggles with her husband as he suffers through the late stages of multiple sclerosis.  Also, new poems by Benjamin Grossberg, Jonathan Johnson, and Cubs fan John W. Evans.  We also have a terrific Found Text feature on the letters of James Stern, and poetry editor Marc McKee sits down with Natasha Trethewey to talk poetry, New Orleans, and LeBron James (okay, I made that last one up).

A big Thank You to all our contributors, staff, designers, and printers: the new issue looks wonderful!  I know our readers will soon agree.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.