ISSUES | summer 2017

The old believe everything, the middle aged suspect everything, and the young know everything. Oscar Wilde Teenage: the Prehistory of Youth Culture by Jon Savage. Penguin, reprint edition, 2008, 576 pp.,…    read more

Escape, empowerment, and liberating energy are primary subjects of much of post-Victorian children’s’ fiction (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz), while common themes of serious…    read more

We don’t know it yet, but is the last year of group sleepovers. These overnight parties will get cattier and cattier over the course of the next few months, the…    read more

My mother doesn’t need to tell me about the bad days. The bad days when her muscles spasm and the bare nerves make her limbs go numb. The bad days…    read more

My grandfather, the Reverend Thomas Argyle Faith, lost his right thumb when he was sixty-five trying to save a cow in labor. After that he used his index and middle…    read more

Eileen knew the drill. The phlebotomist looked for a good vein, would finally give up, and then she would use the one Eileen had suggested originally, the big vein at…    read more

Grandma did not speak to my mother for the first ten or so years of my parents’ marriage. My parents were early adopters of what other people might label color-blindness…    read more

“Slow Motion”
“The Idle Ants”
“Trying to Sleep”
“The Sun That Reds”
“Laniakea”

“Nice, France, 1890”
“Magdeburg, Germany, 1912”
“Tehran, Iran, 1941”
“Los Alamos, New Mexico, 1945”
“At Last, She is Finished with Emptiness”

I was curious to see what time and motherhood and having lots and lots of money had done to Ruth. Lots of good, as it turned out. This story is…    read more

Oh, he was a lousy fifth-grade teacher, certainly worse than any of his own teachers had been with the possible exception of Mrs. Davis, she of the pear bottom and…    read more

“The Long Cold”
“Theories of Light”
“Outside the University”
“When We Watch Children”
“Two Theories of Ideas”