Associate Editor Molly Reid: In Vanessa Cuti’s “Your Future,” she provokes the reader to fill in the white space around the narrator’s dinner with a prior acquaintance. Familiar in its outline, vivid in its detail—”[The toothpicks] were bent and wet, and the wood fanned at the edges where he had jammed them between his …
Issue 15.2 has arrived in our offices! We’ll be mailing it out to contributors this week, and subscribers will see a nice shrink-wrapped package in their mailboxes sometime soon too. In honor of its release, we’d like to share a special feature: an appreciation of the play included in the issue: The Strangers, by christopher …
A binary star system consists of two stars that rotate around a shared center of mass, appearing to orbit each other. To the naked eye, they are indistinguishable, existing as a single point of light in the night sky. Only through a high-powered telescope can the stars be differentiated as they sear the space around …
When the clinician inserted the tent of seaweed into my cervix, a practice as outdated as Japan’s abortion laws, the tiny stab caused an involuntary jerk and gasp. She firmly pressed one of my knees with her free hand, saying, “Deep breath.” As I exited the room, I nodded, a slight bow to answer hers, …
Associate Editor Caitlin Doyle: In “Metaphor,” just as the poem’s speaker pushes her body to its furthest reaches through intensive exercise, the poet probes the limitations of language. Nicky Beer spurs us to consider how our bodies and our words, depending on how we use them, can act either as barriers to human connection …
Just in time for the National Book Award ceremony tomorrow, we’d like to share an appreciation for one of the nominees in fiction. Editorial Assistant Matt Morgenstern: It’s difficult to summarize Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, published earlier this year by Riverhead (and nominated for this year’s National Book Award). Dwight Garner does a good job in the …
We’ve seen writers querying their followers on social media: Where should I send a story about X? A poem about Y? An essay in which I thread both Z and W together? Here’s a little how-to from our staff on how to find good magazines to send your work to. And in honor of one …
We’re ready to bark, howl, chatter, or yip the good news! Winners of the Tenth Annual Robert and Adele Schiff Awards in Poetry and Prose Tori Malcangio for her story “See What I Mean” (chosen by Michael Griffith) Maggie Millner for her poem “Cherry Valley” (chosen by Rebecca Lindenberg) Thank you …
Assistant Editor Jess Jelsma Masterton: Many writers shy away from the second-person perspective. Some literary journals go so far as to caution writers against submitting stories written in second person, suggesting that the point of view is somehow gimmicky or overwrought. While it certainly draws attention to itself, when the second-person perspective is done well, …
