ISSUES | fall 2015

Out of this World Magic and literature are sibling arts. Both deal with the unexpected connectedness of things, transformation from one state to another, and with the human urge to…    read more

“Fourth State of Matter”
“Chrysalis”
“Sound of the Spinning Wheel”
“Storm Coming”

Houdini, my cocker spaniel with a massive eating disorder, was fated to a death by gorging. Or so I’d thought. As a puppy, he chewed books and tampons and tissues…    read more

Late August 1997 We are having soup for dinner and I am in a terrible mood. It is a ridiculous soup: vegetable broth with these flimsy noodles shaped like matchsticks.…    read more

What she would remember, when she saw the dog thrashing in the Sound and the disarticulated body parts of her husband and daughter trawled up from the wreckage of the…    read more

His friend the graduate student, though, now that was another story. Her mother had named her Stanwycke after Barbara Stanwyck, for the role she’d played in Double Indemnity—her mother had whimsically added the final e—and everyone called her Wicky. Fallon called her Wicky, too, but he also called her Stanwycke once in a while, and he thought of her as Stanwycke like the name of a grand old English country house, a house with a name, a house the mere sight of which let you know exactly what you wanted out of life. Fallon wanted Wicky, gap-toothed smile and all.

On Saba’s last day in Addis Ababa, she had just one unchecked to-do left on her long and varied list, which was to explore the neighborhood on her own, even though she’d promised her relatives that she would always take someone with her when she left the house. But she was twenty, a grown-up, and wanted to know that on her first-ever trip to this city of her birth, she’d gained at least some degree of independence and assimilation.

I know the Lord delivered Alfred Konopacki to me. Whether he did it for Alfred’s sake or for mine alone I can’t say, but I can see His plan at work since at least the summer I was fourteen. That was the summer—late summer, October almost—that my Daddy woke me up one Saturday morning and said he was taking me to work on Jim Tucker’s farm.

We meet throwing rocks at the Shkola 837, and right away I know we’ll be friends. Zhivka has a terrible overhand but an angry set to her jaw that makes me step back and watch. A stone sails whitely through the air and connects with glass, and then she goes for another. The window shatters. We’re thirteen years old, artists in the making. Failure running through our lives like a rotted thread.

“The Fortune Our Bodies Told”
“Teeth”
“I’m Not”
“Night Cream”

The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis. Knopf, 2006, 304 pp., $24.95. Stalking the Wild Asparagus by Euell Gibbons. Alan C. Hood & Co., 2005, 303 pp., $17.50 (paper).…    read more

“Milkweed”
“Flood”
“If We Are to Go Forward”
“River Path”