The Skunks

by Fiona Warnick

Dear Skunks, I wrote. Then I got stuck. What was there to say about the skunks? Of course there was the smell—the spraying. Everyone’s mind jumped to the spraying. I often forgot about the spraying entirely, which was nice because it made me feel that I wasn’t like other people.

From the outside, Isabel doesn’t seem to have much going on. It’s the summer after college graduation and she’s moved back to her hometown, where she spends her days house-sitting, babysitting, working the front desk at a yoga studio, and hanging out with her childhood friend Ellie. But on the inside, Isabel’s mind is always running, always analyzing, and right now, she’s trying hard to not let her thoughts give weight to boys. So when Isabel spots three baby skunks in the yard, their presence is not only a strangely thrilling break from the expected, it feels like a fortuitous sign from the universe. Skunks. That’s what she should be thinking about. 

As the summer unfolds, Isabel becomes increasingly preoccupied with the skunks, while also navigating her various jobs and an ambiguous relationship with Eli, the son of the couple she’s house-sitting for. In her own life and in the imagined inner lives of the skunks, Isabel ponders the nature of existence, love vs. infatuation, and the many small moments that make us animal, make us human. The Skunks is an unforgettable coming-of-age story about the complexities of crushes, desire, friendship, and modern life.

Nonfiction

by Julie Myerson

This is definitely not a ghost story. But for a while after you’re gone, I see you everywhere. Every ragged young person sitting huddled on a pavement, every stretched-out body under cardboard in a shop doorway.

Two parents stand by powerlessly as their only child seems intent on destroying herself. As the mother—a novelist—attempts to understand her daughter, she finds herself revisiting her own uneasy, unresolved relationship with her mother. Weaving between childhoods past and present, laced with temptation and betrayal, Nonfiction: A Novel is an unflinching account of a mother, daughter, wife, and author reckoning with the world around her. But can a writer ever be trusted with the truth of her own story?

Clear-eyed, lacerating, and fearless, Julie Myerson’s Nonfiction: A Novel explores maternal love as an emotional foundation to both crave and fear. A hauntingly beautiful and deeply moving love letter from a mother to a daughter, this is a tale of damage and addiction, recovery and creativity, compassion and love.

Tin House Magazine: Winter Reading 2015

by Win McCormack

The best company on a cold night is hot new fiction, poems, essays, and interviews. Warm up with Tin House this winter.

Fiction by Dorothy Allison, Patrick deWitt, Helen Phillips, Martha McPhee, Drew Ciccolo, James Scudamore, and Andrea Barrett

Poetry by Sharon Olds, Caroline Knox, Adam Fitzgerald, Cornelius Eady, Caroline O’Connor Thomas, and Timmy Straw

Features by Claire Vaye Watkins, Evie Wyld & Joe Sumner, Rachel Jamison Webster, CJ Hauser, and John Fischer

Lost & Founds by Carrie Brown, James Guida, Pamela Erens, Scott F. Parker, and Carol Keeley

Village Weavers

by Myriam J. A. Chancy

From award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy comes an extraordinary and enduring story of two families—forever joined by country, and by long-held secrets—and two girls with a bond that refuses to be broken. In 1940s’ Port-au-Prince, Gertie and Sisi become fast childhood friends, despite being on opposite ends of the social and economic ladder. As young girls, they build their unlikely friendship—until a deathbed revelation ripples through their families and tears them apart. After François Duvalier’s rule turns deadly in the 1950s, Sisi moves to Paris, while Gertie marries into a wealthy Dominican family. Across decades and continents, through personal success and failures, they are parted and reunited, slowly learning the truth of their singular relationship. Finally, six decades later, with both women in the United States, a sudden phone call brings them back together once more to reckon with and—perhaps—forgive the past.

Told with power and frankness, Village Weavers confronts the silences around class, race, and nationality, charts the moments when lives are irrevocably forced apart, and envisions two girls—connected their entire lives—who try to break inherited cycles of mistrust and find ways back into each other’s hearts.

A Kind of Madness

by Uche Okonkwo

Set in contemporary Nigeria, Uche Okonkwo’s A Kind of Madness is a collection of ten stories concerned with literal madness but also those private feelings that, when left unspoken, can feel like a type of madness: desire, desperation, hunger, fear, sadness, shame, longing. In these stories, a young woman and her mother bask in the envy of their neighbors when the woman receives an offer of marriage from the family of a doctor living in Belgium—though when the offer fails to materialize, that envy threatens to turn vicious, pitting them both against their village. A teenage girl from a poor family is dazzled by her rich, vivacious friend, but as the friend’s behavior grows unstable and dangerous, she must decide whether to cover for her or risk telling the truth to get her the help she needs. And a lonely daughter finds herself wandering a village in eastern Nigeria in an ill-fated quest, struggling to come to terms with her mother’s mental illness.

In vivid, evocative prose, A Kind of Madness unravels the tensions between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, best friends, siblings, and more, marking the arrival of an extraordinary new talent in fiction and inviting us all to consider the question: why is it that the people and places we hold closest are so often the ones that drive us to madness? 

The Woman in the Sable Coat

by Elizabeth Brooks

At the height of the Second World War in England, twenty-two year old Nina Woodrow joins the British Royal Air Force and rebels against her careful upbringing by embarking on an illicit affair with an officer. She risks losing everything for Guy Nicholson: her comfortable home, her childhood friends, and, especially, the love of her father, an enigmatic widower.  

Meanwhile, in the sleepy village where Nina grew up, where the upheavals of war seem far away and divorce remains taboo, Kate Nicholson struggles to cope with her new role as the wronged wife. She finds an unlikely confidant in Nina’s father, Henry, and as they grow closer Kate finds that she’s embroiled in something much murkier, and more menacing, than a straightforward friendship. 

Sweeping and impassioned, with pitch-perfect period detail, Elizabeth Brooks’ The Woman in the Sable Coat tells the story of two families fatally entangled in one another’s deepest, darkest secrets.

Tin House Magazine: Summer Reading 2015

by Win McCormack

Summer Reading 2015 features previously untranslated work from 2014 Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano on Paris and a timely essay from Lewis Hyde revisiting the 1964 murder of two young black men in Mississippi. In addition to these works by established authors, this issue also presents work from five New Voices in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Featuring fiction from: Jodi Angel, Smith Henderson, Greg Hrbek, Tara Ison, Patrick Modiano, Matthew Socia, and Sarah Elaine Smith
Poetry by: Catherine Barnett, Cody Carvel, Diana M. Chien, Rita Gabis, Robert Duncan Gray, Kimiko Hahn, Ed Skoog, and Jenny Xie
Nonfiction by: Mary Barnett, David Gessner, and Lewis Hyde
Lost & Found: S. Shankar on Agnes Smedley, John Reed on André Gide, Jessica Handler on Berton Roueché, Jonathan Russell Clark on H.D., and Rachel Riederer on Barbara Grizzuti Harrison.

Tin House

by Holly MacArthur

Enjoy the hottest new fiction, shine some light with uniquely personal nonfiction, and then cool off in the shade with the poets.

Tin House Magazine: Candy

by Holly MacArthur

Candy is all sugary, brightly colored, dangerous temptation—from jawbreakers to candy floss. From the comforting and childlike to those desirable things that can easily turn lurid and even destructive.Featuring stories, essays, and poems on appetites and the pursuit of pleasure, the hard edge on something sickly sweet, and the eternal allure of something you can’t quite trust. Candy—everyone wants more than is good for them.

Tin House Magazine: Summer Reading 2016

by John Ashbery

Tin House is your literary companion for the dog days of Summer. Whether on a picnic blanket or a porch swing, the fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in Tin House will help you while away the hours.

Featuring new work from Miller Oberman, Michael Dickman, and Malerie Willens.

Tin House Magazine: Sex, Again?

by Win McCormack

Featuring fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from established writers and new voices, Issue 69 will try hard to keep it exciting and fresh, even after all these years.

Tin House Magazine: Rehab

by Rob Spillman

Kick the habit, rebuild that public image, and get back in fighting shape with Tin House this Spring. We’re coming at Rehab from every possible angle with new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from established authors and New Voices alike.

Tin House Magazine: Faith

by Win McCormack

Showcasing fiction, poems, essays, and interviews dealing not only with religious faith but also faith in knowledge, math, science, people, animals, places, institutions, food, color—anything that could possibly be a receptacle for one’s faith, questioned or unquestioned, held or lost.

Hazardous Spirits

by Anbara Salam

In 1920s Edinburgh, Scotland, Evelyn Hazard is a young, middle-class housewife living the life she’s always expected—until her husband, Robert, upends everything with a startling announcement: he can communicate with the dead.

The couple is pulled into the spiritualist movement—a religious society of mediums and psychics that emerged following the mass deaths of the Spanish flu and First World War—and Evelyn’s carefully composed world begins to unravel. And when long-held secrets from her past threaten to come to the surface, presenting her with the prospect of losing all she holds dear, Evelyn finds herself unable to avoid the question: is the man she loves a fraud, a madman, or—most frighteningly—is he telling the truth?

Cloaked in the moody, beguiling backdrop of twentieth-century Scotland, Anbara Salam’s Hazardous Spirits brings a sparkling sense of period detail and dry humor to the life of a young woman whose world is unsettled by mediums and spirits, revealing the devastating secrets that ghosts from the past can tell when given the voice to do so.

Dearborn

by Ghassan Zeineddine

Spanning several decades, Ghassan Zeineddine’s debut collection examines the diverse range and complexities of the Arab American community in Dearborn, Michigan. In ten tragicomic stories, Zeineddine explores themes of identity, generational conflicts, war trauma, migration, sexuality, queerness, home and belonging, and more.

In Dearborn, a father teaches his son how to cheat the IRS and hide their cash earnings inside of frozen chickens. Tensions heighten within a close-knit group of couples when a mysterious man begins to frequent the local gym pool, dressed in Speedos printed with nostalgic images of Lebanon. And a failed stage actor attempts to drive a young Lebanese man with ambitions of becoming a Hollywood action hero to LA, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have other plans.

By turns wildly funny, incisive, and deeply moving, Dearborn introduces readers to an arresting new voice in contemporary fiction and invites us all to consider what it means to be part of a place and community, and how it is that we help one another survive.