ISSUES | winter 2018

Aristotle’s Poetics was written circa 335 b.c.e. but then lost for many centuries, available only through a translation of an Arabic version. Much of its meaning has been argued over,…    read more

In the summer of 1924, while completing The Great Gatsby on the French Riviera, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins, “For Christ’s sake don’t give anyone…    read more

Huck Out West by Robert Coover. W. W. Norton & Co., 2017, 308 pp., $26.95 (hardcover). The Boy in His Winter: an American Novel by Norman Lock. Bellevue Literary Press,…    read more

In 1917, while serving as a second lieutenant in the British Army on the Western Front, twenty-six-year-old James Whale was captured by the Germans at Aisne Farm in France. Led…    read more

That Friday afternoon in AAA Guns and Jewels, Shaun’s life flashed before his eyes, just as they said it would when you faced death, though it wasn’t his death but…    read more

For a brief period in my late twenties, I lived alone on a horse ranch at 9,500 feet in the San Juan Mountains. The closest human heartbeat was thirteen miles…    read more

“Codex”
“Relic”
“Hush Harbor”
“Water Worth Crossing”
“Sieve”

About eighteen months ago, six months after my wife had been diagnosed with stage 2B breast cancer, I was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer with metastasis to the liver.…    read more

“The Portrait Artist”
“Ode to Riposte”
“The Nature of Advice”
“In Flight”
“Observation”
“Returning Books to a University Library”

Jill was still sleeping so he got out of bed quietly, and in the bathroom he pulled on his swimming suit and stepped into his sandals. She was still sleeping…    read more

Funding was always an issue. This was one of the administration’s favorite lines, and it was, Jonathan would later tell himself, what led to the mistake, which led to the…    read more

My wife left work two hours ago and still isn’t home, so I’m haunting our back window, watching snow sweep through the ochre cone of a streetlamp further down our…    read more

I’m driving down the street and I have an overwhelming urge to take a bite out of my steering wheel, so I do. The steering wheel is black plastic, more…    read more

Of course, Luce and I weren’t paid for anything so easy as bringing alcohol to alcoholics. It was more like we did that part of the job for free and…    read more

“Big Lie. Little Lie.”
“Nowhere: A Study”
“At the Seaside Cemetery in Blue Hill, Maine”
“The Last Happy Hour”