ISSUES | spring 2025

Outsiders   Much has been made of the American literary tendency to “build . . . your own world,” as Emerson puts it in Nature (1836). Emerson urges American writers…    read more

THE SWIMMER  Jeffery Brady  Atop the hill in Beck Springs sits the Baptist church, white and lonely on this late November day. The wide oak tree that gives the church…    read more

GIRLS’ DAY ELEGY  It has nothing to do with you that she shares your name, my new friend, with whom tomorrow I will hie off to wine country. Neither of…    read more

Golden Boy   Justin Thurman  Nobody that night in the Evans Middle School gymnasium liked Juicy John Bishop. Wrestling out of Vegas, Juicy John called himself the “Legend Stopper.” He was…    read more

TIGER GIRL Phuong Anh Le   Mrs. Loan cannot remember the last time she’s been to a street café. Standing in front of the stained two-story building, Mrs. Loan hesitates to…    read more

AXIS Long after we don’t live there anymore, I drive three hundred miles to lay myself across the driveway of my childhood home. As if, through the scent of asphalt…    read more

Enemy of the Good  Drew Calvert My favorite communist ever was this Airbnb host named Reg, a short, furry, retired professor of sociology. By communist I mean party member—Reg was…    read more

Aujourd’hui, Maman  In the weeks to come you will move through time with an enviable fluency. You will go back to Lugano the summer before   my first year of high…    read more

The Midnight Cry Sarah Mullens Also because it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking. Deleuze and…    read more

A Crawfish Boil at the End of the World  William Torrey   When we are wrung dry and can’t stand the thought of ourselves for even one more day, we call…    read more

La Coruña  Mark Labowskie  When you’re young, all you do is worry about the future; when you’re old, all you do is think about the past. In 1964, when I…    read more

James Ensor: The Pain Artist    “For me as well, art is born of pain and except in rare instances my life is bound up with bitterness and disillusionment.” – James…    read more

Theda Bara: the Original Vamp    To ensure the success of the 1915 film A Fool There Was, Fox Film Corporation launched one of the most lavish, ludicrous, and successful publicity…    read more

Hoodwinked: Four Novels About Becoming a Mother  Cynthia Miller Coffel    Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. Vintage, 2022, 256 pp., $17.00 (paperback).  The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan. 37…    read more