Winter Reading

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Editor's Note

In her short story “The Wolves,” Kseniya Melnik blends Russian fairy tales with Stalin-era paranoia to bring us closer to the feeling of Russian history while at the same time shining light on the dark underpinnings of our current moment. In an excerpt from her forthcoming novel, Red Clocks, Leni Zumas gives us a world where abortion has been outlawed, creating a state that feels like a lucid dream. In this issue we have more poetry than usual, as it seems contemporary poets are especially attuned to the productive ambiguity frequency and now is one of those zeitgeist moments when we most need them. Paisley Rekdal, in her poem “Marsyas,” writes that Apollo “never understands what he plays, / knowing only how his hand / trembles over the plucked muscle: / adding, he thinks, something lower to the notes, / something sweeter, and infinitely strange.”