Spring 2003
New Series · Volume XXV Number 2

about the cover

Our cover design by Nanette Black features Paris 1949, a photograph of an early morning walk along the Seine in Paris by Christer Strömholm. Strömholm frequently walked this route, crossing the river from his home at the Left Bank on his way to the cafés at Rue de Rivoli on the Right Bank, where he used to take his breakfast. This is the sixth and final in a series of photographs by Strömholm to grace the cover of The Kenyon Review. Strömholm, a leading Swedish photographer, died in 2002.

editor's notes

Teachers have always been among our best and most faithful readers. Not only do they care passionately about what is new and exciting in the literary world, many of them carry this passion—and this magazine—into their classrooms. The challenge for them, of course, is that preparing fresh discussions of new stories or essays or poems that arrive with every issue is a burden. Whatever their personal delight in making new discoveries, teachers understandably want something more permanent on which to plan their courses from year to year.

With that in mind, a few years ago (I visit classrooms as often as possible and work with teachers to make KR useful to them) I began to develop the notion of a Kenyon Review Reader, a selection of material that would give pleasure to general readers and provide a text to complement regular issues of KR in classrooms across the country. Originally the idea was that this compendium would also mark the sixtieth anniversary of The Kenyon Review. But as I’ve found over the years, such ideas tend to move more slowly to fruition than one might wish. So here we are some sixty-four years from John Crowe Ransom’s first issue—and I believe the wait and effort have been well worth it.

I am delighted to announce The Kenyon Review Reader, to appear in Fall 2003 from Sourcebooks, Inc.

This extraordinary volume will feature writers who have shaped the literary landscape for decades. Stories by Flannery O’Connor, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Pynchon, just to name a few. Poems by Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas, Eavan Boland. Essays by W. H. Auden, Lewis Hyde, and Mr. Ransom too. In her introduction Joyce Carol Oates calls this a “splendidly multifarious” collection and “a remarkable gathering of twentieth-century riches.” I believe you’ll find that claim no exaggeration.

This will be the first of three volumes from The Kenyon Review to appear over the next few years in collaboration with Sourcebooks. They are a dynamic and quickly growing publisher (visit www.Sourcebooks.com ), and we are excited by the prospect of producing superb new books with them.

But let me return where I began: teachers. I believe that The Kenyon Review Reader will provide them a mix of classic literature, along with some of the most exciting voices of this generation. Their students will come to understand that great writing doesn’t belong to a golden age lying ungraspably beyond the horizon. The relevance of stories and poems written in more recent years and months will smack them with power and immediacy.

~David H. Lynn