ISSUES | spring 2015

  Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood by Anna Enright. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013, 208 pp., $15.95 (paper).   Abbott Awaits by Chris Bachelder. Louisiana State University Press, 2011,…    read more

It’s sometimes said that realism and social commentary are at the heart of British and Continental literature—Flaubert, Dickens, Eliot, Tolstoy—while American literature is replete with haunted Romantic seekers, loners and…    read more

These men looked as rumpled and sleazy as characters out of a Raymond Chandler novel. Talk about Jarndyce v Jarndyce, nothing had changed in this world in over a hundred…    read more

It wasn’t the guns that bothered her but rather the heat, which was the true killing machine. Guns had always been with her; they figured in her earliest memories. Her…    read more

I just wanted to stare at it for a while, to sit on it and make engine noises. I was scared of it, though I wouldn’t have admitted it at…    read more

I was usually on the dean’s list, but that semester in my senior year things had nosedived. It began with a bout of influenza in January, followed by a sprinkling…    read more

Everybody knew her as Gretchen, but that wasn’t her real name. That was just what her brother Tommy called her—had called her one time when they were teenagers—and it had…    read more

Winner of the 2014 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize for Essay. My wife and I have this running joke about my father-in-law, Ron, a blind-in-one-eye, seventy-nine-year-old retired golf pro with…    read more

I’ll show you the backside of your soul. That’s what Arvel Wilkes told Nolan’s mother, Sigrid, the night of the attack. Nolan had found a manila envelope with a smeared carbon copy of the original police report inside. She had been just twenty-six when it happened, younger than Nolan now. The report didn’t note what his mother said in response to Wilkes, just that there were “minimal defensive marks on victim.” They had been living on the north side of Seattle at the time, his father away on a business trip, Nolan asleep in his crib.

“Anna May Wong fans her time machine”
“Anna May Wong blows out sixteen candles”
“Anna May Wong meets Josephine Baker”
“Anna May Wong makes cameos”
“Anna May Wong rates the runway”

“Great Plains Food Bank”
“Listening to a Rail in Mandan”
“Moorcroft”
“County 19”
“Butte”

Winner of the 2014 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize for Poetry

“Ofelia Has Not Seen Even One of the Seven Wonders of the World, and People Keep Making New Lists”
“Letters to Phryne”