FICTION

Allan Gurganus FETCH
Something is thrown. We retrieve it without quite knowing why.

Alice Fulton A SHADOW TABLE
That’s how I came to be a waitress. I wanted to serve food. And I wanted to serve Ray.

Ehud Havazelet BILLAND ARLENE
They were happy and in love and saw no reason to believe a good life didn’t stretch out before them. Then Bill noticed an ad toward the back of the Sunday travel section.

Adam Johnson HURRICANES ANONYMOUS
The boarded-up Outback Steakhouse next door is swamped with FEMA campers, and a darkened AMC 16 is a Lollapalooza of urban camping.

Helen Schulman PARENTS' NIGHT (complete story)
We were at a cocktail party for incoming parents at our daughter’s school when I spied my ex-husband amid a sea of ophthalmologic

Keith Lee Morris AN EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL THE DART LEAGUE KING
Liza Hatter had a thing for him, Tristan happened to know, in the same way he almost always knew . . . when it came to love or sex or however you wanted to refer to it.

.NEW VOICE FICTION

Marissa Perry TRESPASSING
Cindy Ferris spun the bottle on her bedroom floor and kissed us one by one. It was just a peck. It was only practice.

Paul Feldman SPECIALISTS
The lunar transport is not trimmed up with the latest sensors and the auto controls are a bit blunt, so it’s a tricky beast.

POETRY

Mary Jo Bang
THE MAGIC THAT MAKES EVERYTHING RIGHT
FINAL REPORT
CONSIDER THIS CORRUPTION

Frank Bidart
GAZE

Thomas James
DRAGON'S TEETH
RURAL WINTER

Beth Bachmann
SECOND MYSTERY OF MY SISTER

Eileen Myles
SNOWFLAKE
ROCK ON
QUESTIONS

Oliver de la Paz
EXCUSE POEM
PENTIMENTO APOLOGIA

NEW VOICE–POETRY

Bridget Talone
EXPECTING HONEY (complete poem)
GIVEN DISTANCE, I MIGHT SEE HIS DYING

INTERVIEW

AN INTERVIEW WITH FRANK BIDART
Craig Morgan Teicher and the acclaimed poet discuss the necessity of play, poems as process, and Robert Lowell’s sonnets. And the pane of glass that separates us from the pain of our desire.

ESSAYS & FEATURES

Gerald Howard THE CRAZY SPASMODIC
Wherein we learn how author Leonard Michaels was crowned the once and future king of literary badass-ness. And wherein we learn how sex, violence, and Yiddish make strange bedfellows.

Elizabeth Benedict WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED?
Elizabeth Hardwick’s bullying presence belied the sensitivity of her writing voice, but it helped her storm the gates of the good old boys’ club of American letters.

Chris Adrian A GOOD CREATURE
The writer loses a lover to a retriever because of a Levitical fear of uncleanliness, and is doomed to a dogged and desperate search for a home in creation.

LOST & FOUND

Jesse Nathan
ON J. P. JACOBSEN'S Mogens and Other Stories

Cheston Knapp
ON The Journal of Jules Renard

Aaron Hamburger
ON J. S. MARCUS'S The Captain’s Fire

Edward Schwarzschild
ON PHILIP ROTH'S Letting Go

CJ Evans
ON THOMAS JAMES'S Letters to a Stranger

READABLE FEAST

Douglas Bauer WHAT WE HUNGER FOR
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher lived to eat. For her, food opened the doors to the deeper meanings of life, where succulent raw oysters can be the bitter pills of lost love and a past meal can signal a desire for meaning that never lets us go, no matter how stuffed and glutted we may become.