Issue 21

Touch and Go

Fall 2004
,

$20.00

Out of stock

Description
Editor's Note

Repression equals inspiration. So, it stands to reason that given the current climate in America, memorable art is bubbling up through chaos and anger. At Tin House we are seeing it in the crispness in the writing, in the newfound urgency of work that deeply cares about the meaning of words. A few examples: Amanda Eyre Ward’s story “Why the Sky Changed” delves into the personal aftermath of 9/11, while “End of the Line,” Aimee Bender’s harrowing and darkly comic tale of a miniature person kept as a pet by a normal-sized man, could be read as an imperialist fable. Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney’s new translation of Sophocles’s Antigone eerily resonates today, over two millennia after it was written. And Mary Yukari Waters’s “Caste System” beautifully captures the subtle interpersonal politics of a modern Japanese family. George Saunders, in an illuminating interview, talks of trusting the “hot spots” in his fiction.