ISSUES | spring 2010
33.1 (Spring 2010): "Uncharted"
Featuring the winners of the 2009 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize, and work by Sarah Blackman, May-lee Chai, Kerry Hardie, Tom Ireland, Reese Okyong Kwon, Rachel Riederer, Diane Simmons, Jonathan Starke… and an interview with Robert Wrigley.
CONTENT FROM THIS ISSUE
Nonfiction
Mar 01 2010
Famous
On the night of November 26, 2008, two men walked into Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai, India, and started shooting and throwing grenades into the crowds of travelers “indiscriminately,” as reported in the official Indian account of the attack. In a railway station that accommodates two million passengers every day, a place where one can hardly stand during peak hours without being swept into a river of people, they couldn’t very well have missed. In minutes the dead and dying lay throughout the concourse, their limbs splayed in grotesque postures, and blood pooled on the station’s concrete floor.
Nonfiction
Mar 01 2010
What Happens to Heroes
I rolled the glass vial in my hand, back and forth, as if I were rocking the steroids to sleep. Ben had just lifted it from a small box hidden in his bedroom. The box looked like the kind of case gamblers might carry to hold their chips all in a row. I’d watched Ben’s big fingers pry open the latches and raise the lid. Inside, several small vials were lined up neatly, the syringes askew; two of them slanted so that the skinny needles pointed right at me.
Nonfiction
Mar 01 2010
Patient
The bus will have to move. I’m under its rear tires on the passenger side, and with the crowd, the driver can’t see me in the mirror. “Can you please tell him to move?” I say to someone leaning over me. It is easy to be calm because I cannot really have been run over by a bus.
Nonfiction
Mar 01 2010
A Hive of Mysterious Danger
If you we re to remove the roof tops from these prisons, you would uncover a world of dramatic intensities, a world of cruelty and faith and madness and perversion and boredom and humor and tragedy and despair. But it is a world almost entirely ignored by the broader taxpaying public….
Reviews
Mar 01 2010
Obession as Mythmaking: Six Books About Books
Featuring reviews of:
The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World by Paul Collins
Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife by Francine Prose
Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea
Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style by Mark Garvey
U and I by Nicholson Baker
Frankenstein: A Cultural History by Susan Hitchcock
Fiction
Mar 01 2010
Tomorrow in Shanghai
Zhang Xiaobing would not have called himself a bad person, should anyone have been given the opportunity to pose such a question to the prisoner. In fact, if you asked anyone other than the court-appointed defense attorney whose main function in the trial was to enter Zhang’s guilty plea, the prosecutor and the panel of three judges, who had found him guilty and sentenced him to death, very few people who knew Zhang would have said he was a bad person—wicked, evil, corrupt, a low-born thing, a turtle’s egg, a nonhuman devil whose crimes would merit the ultimate punishment.
Poetry
Mar 01 2010
Poetry Feature: Sarah Blackman
Featuring the poems: Baucis and Philemon, The Event Horizon, Melancholia; a Fantasy, A Marriage Poem, The Distance Between the House and the Barn
Poetry
Mar 01 2010
Poetry Feature: Christina Hutchins
Featuring the poems: Fossil, City Lights, Spring Rain, Wednesday Afternoon, Wheels, After Joseph, Into your pocket
Fiction
Mar 01 2010
Yukon River
It’s 1975, and Len had known about the pipeline. But he thought it would be far away, lost in the immense space of Alaska, a trickle of silver sliding alone silently in the vast slope of snow. As he lay on his bunk in Folsom, he had not thought of it being right here, a fat, ugly snake of greed and pollution; he had not imagined it strangling the little snow-covered log town he had fallen in love with.
Fiction
Mar 01 2010
Exotic Animal Medicine
“My first vodka as a married woman,” said Sarah. She sat against David and felt the day carry them toward each other. The hours passed at the pub, and they didn’t think of going home, although this was what they looked forward to: the privacy of their bed against smudged windows, its view of small gardens and the beat of trapped bees against glass that shook as the buses moved by. Their bed was a long way from the colleges and the river, but the bells would still come over the roads and houses, and they would be alone, and married. The day moved them both toward the moment in which they would face each other in their bed, utterly familiar, and see that despite their marriage there was no change, and that this was just what they wanted.
Foreword
Mar 01 2010
Uncharted
In Fiona McFarlane’s Jeffrey E. Smith Prize-winning story “Exotic Animal Medicine,” a young Australian woman veterinarian in England undergoes a disturbing set of incidents on the day that she marries… read more
Poetry
Mar 01 2010
Poetry Feature: Kerry Hardie
Featuring the poems: Fear; Emigration Photo; Negation; A man died in the valley today,; November’s Birds
Fiction
Mar 01 2010
Queen Disease
They came to class in bandages. Girls came to class in bandages. It started six days in. One of the girls was missing, but we still expected her. I stood at the podium in my high heels, pretending to be tall and not thinking of my dead mother.
Interviews
Mar 01 2010
A Conversation with Robert Wrigley
If you don’t love stories, then what takes the place of that desire? We live by stories; they are the bedrock of articulate human existence. It’s not possible to imagine a world in which there are no stories. The problem comes in the telling, of course. In my family, stories were a kind of spendable currency, and everyone told them. I suppose if one were determined to forget where he came from, that would require a kind of militant denial of one’s own past, and while such a denial might be eff ected, it’s really a species of pathology.