ISSUES | fall 2016

  On a visit to New York, my wife and I happened to see Alec Baldwin pacing back and forth talking on a cell phone outside a Fifth Avenue apartment…    read more

“When Your Surgeon Brought Snapshots to the Waiting Room”
“Though We Made Love in the Afternoons”
from “In the Days between Detection and Diagnosis”
“When My Job Is to Wait”

“Theories of Flight and Forbearance”
“Among the Crenellations”
“Unstitching”
“The Art of War”

“The tragic undertones that mar our best achievements”
“When you think of the past, what comes to mind is the dead”
“It has been observed before, of course, how oppressive”
“How instructive, the skull placed among the bric-a-brac”
“Or take, for instance, this still life from a Pompeii wall”
“The apples in the basket, the apples of the mind”

Craig drove home with his three-month chip in his pocket. His mom used to call night drives insect massacres, and he’d always been sad to see all the bug bodies…    read more

After two pitchers of IPA, my friend, Old Rob, would say things like, “The existence of the ‘self’ is so highly unlikely that it makes any debate over the existence…    read more

I can’t tell what I would think about the Iraq war, now, if I hadn’t long ago slept with a man who happened to go on to be a Navy…    read more

Before Taigu, people warned me: China was fiercely social country. After I arrived, I rarely went anywhere unaccompanied. I was ushered into crowded noodle stalls and into corner stores stuffed…    read more

One Doesn’t Always Wish to Converse on Airplanes but this tanned, fit couple—white-sweatered, like tennis pros—seemed eager to talk, so we talked. No, their final destination wasn’t Denver. They’d continue…    read more

When Priscilla first learned that Conard was planning to have his son christened, her worries centered on the ceremony—its implications, her memories. Safe at home in her small Wisconsin Avenue…    read more