ISSUES | fall 2019

Galleries know there is a certain type of painting that sells, and every gallery has one or two artists whose work isn’t exciting or edgy but are kept on because…    read more

Once in a dream I sat reclined in an old-fashioned dentist’s chair at the center of an empty stage illuminated by a single white spotlight. Over my right shoulder, a…    read more

“Literalism has no place in theater.” —Jo Mielziner   NOTES FOR THE DESIGNER The set is the bed-sitting-room of a plantation home in the Mississippi Delta. It is along an…    read more

After installing my mother at the facility, we drove home in shock. My father sat in the passenger seat scratching his unshaven chin and spoke about the threat of rain…    read more

Before I got baby chicks, I attended chicken class at Wardell’s Feed and Pet, a few miles down the highway. Eric, the chicken class teacher, sold me a brooder. If…    read more

Sometimes Ned Parrish dreams that his ex-wife has come back and lives out of his converted office and greets him in the hallway like an apologetic stranger. Their daughter, Julie,…    read more

Spring Teatime, 4 o’clock  We sit in the west courtyard. We chat about the times we have nearly died over our long lifetimes. Death is a tossed stone. Memory is…    read more

Bradfield, Elizabeth. Toward Antarctica. Boreal Books, 2019. 160 pp. $19.95, paper. Lee, Ed Bok. Mitochondrial Night. Coffee House Press, 2019. 88 pp. $16.95, paper. Wahmanholm, Claire. Wilder. Milkweed Editions, 2019.…    read more

My Favorite YouTube Channel think Beetlejuice without Michael Keaton but with one hundred Geena Davises dressed in floral nightgowns   think absolute freedom   standing in a house of haunted…    read more

What Is to Be Done?         for S. Reddick, 1976 I’ll answer your question now, the one you asked that evening we sat in your room, the…    read more

At least not in the Czech Republic. But it’s the first thing I need to see. So I take the train from Prague to Pribram, fifty miles to the south.…    read more

(1741) Sarah Campbell Howland, Ada Campbell   In 1803 Sarah Campbell Howland told her story to her granddaughter, Emma Howland, who wrote the story down and, shortly before she died,…    read more

I wake early and water the plants. I have a lot of plants, and it takes the better part of an hour to see to them. Most are rescues that…    read more

The trouble for Dr. Kappelschnitzer started with the obituary:         Shirley Kappelschnitzer, 67, beloved wife of Arnold. Life commemoration:         Tuesday, April 9, 11…    read more

Surrealism is often associated with an absurdist worldview and the gloomier aspects of the larger movement of existentialism. Yet André Breton’s defining 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism is playful and hopeful…    read more