What Cheever Can Tell Us About Writing Through Another Depression
Daniel Torday
In January of 1955, John Cheever took his first teaching post, running a creative writing workshop at Barnard College. Cheever had never even graduated high school—a headstrong Bostonian who had published his first story, “Expelled from Prep School,” in the…
Nothing
Nancy Zafris
1. Three years ago I was making a living as a realtor. The market was on fire. Even a newcomer like me could move houses. All I had to do was pull up to the curb in my car, pose…
Lenses and Eyes
Zach Savich
Review of James Longenbach, The Art of the Poetic Line, and Donald Revell, The Art of Attention (Graywolf Press) As James Longenbach points out in The Art of the Poetic Line, a volume in Graywolf’s series of single-subject books by…
On Joyce Carol Oates’ Wild Nights! Stories about the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway and Christopher Benfey’s A Summer of the Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, & Martin Johnson Heade
David S. Reynolds
In Wild Nights! , titled after the famous Emily Dickinson poem, Joyce Carol Oates gives us fictionalized versions of the ends of the lives of a number of famous American authors. Three of the stories—those based on Mark Twain, Henry…
Eggs
Ernesto Quiñonez
Inelda Flores would’ve preferred a doctor whose looks didn’t resemble her boyfriend’s. Not that he wasn’t cute, it was just that maybe like Eddie, this doctor had most likely cheated on his exams and god knows what else? Thirty-five and…
There is only one space and it contains everything in the world
Byron Kanoti
Piece by piece, the local amusement park forfeits its thrills to flatbeds— I forget traffic [one amputated leg—all studded with sockets—of a terrific arachnid slides away to new suitors] like a prize. I forget how appalling oceans are to the…
Document
Hildred Crill
I was a hedged bet, just one of the holes a rat found and possessed, a last gulp from the welling cup a customer of memories who consumed them. I scraped the slates clean, was the plan to encroach— the…
Cowboys of My Heart: The Six-DVD Box Set
Jackson Bliss
Language setup: Dolby Surround-Sound 7.1 English/Japanese/Spanish/French Audio: English subtitles. Trailer: Stranded in space, a victim of his own pathologies, Mattieu lays on his bed, flicking a cigarette into an ashtray that looks like a green UFO. Through the half-open window…
Head Case
Nance Van Winckel
Large, loud birds. Hot salty breezes. I kept drifting off, dreaming of snow. I felt I wasn’t where I should be, but I didn’t know where “should-be” was. Except, as I told the nurse, I believed it was cold there.…
The Duct Tape Brother
Daniel Torday
When I’d finally saved up enough duct tape, I made myself a duct tape brother. I was an only child growing up, and my friends who had older brothers were always a lot tougher than I was. My duct tape…
We All Owe: A Review of Margaret Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
David F. Smydra Jr.
Anansi, $15.95 (paperback) Few things are so easily defined by their negative as debt. Debt is what we lack—but with a cruel twist. “You are free to draw or not to draw,” says Thomas Mann’s mystic, Cipolla, in “Mario and…
The Rabid Dog
Willie Davis
For Marcum Jay Schneider Early that April—after I’d learned of Delores’s affair, but before I knew the details—I took to waking at sunrise and tramping the streets. Most mornings I kept downtown where I could see the women in their…
The impulsive man acts with fierceness
Quan Barry
Elena handed me the deck. It was an international one, one where each card was printed in six different languages. Italian, French, English, Spanish, German, and one I didn’t recognize, maybe Afrikaans or Dutch. “You read, no?” she said. Her…
The Introspective Vocabulary
Cecily Parks
I wear a furtive when I climb up the hill to deliver the first of the. Of all of them, the first is the most, written without hindsight. My blessings count themselves thusly: if sound is the prerequisite for searching,…
Review of Harry Clifton’s Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004
Jason B. Jones
Wake Forest University Press, $15.95 (paperback) If the point about Edens is that they imply a fall, then the salient biographical fact about Harry Clifton’s Secular Eden would appear to be his return to Ireland in 2004 after living abroad…
Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters
Alfred Corn
edited by Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz Library of America, $40.00 (hardcover) Elizabeth Bishop: Critic In one volume, here we have them, all the essential writings of Elizabeth Bishop, superseding the earlier Collected Poems and Collected Prose. Also included are…
Signifying Nothing
Matthew Byrne
The metaphor got sick of standing for something else, of living and dying by the wit of a dimming audience, of watching itself, as if from outside its body, fussing, flirting, and cajoling for the advancement of another, of being…
The Conjurer’s Repository
Robert Arellano
The conjurer doesn’t carry much. His tools are few, his finery reduced to the flimsy tunic on his back, his fortune nil. But there appears to be no limit to what the conjurer can call up, when called upon. Behold…
