For "the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe grinders. So long as they're good." We are a quarterly literary magazine that was founded in 1953.
Curated by Justin Alvarez.
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Curated by Justin Alvarez.
Current Issue
Google+
Subscribe • Ask us anything
Lydia Davis at the 2013 Man Booker International Prize readings.
“Hay-on-Wye, Wales, has a population of 1,500 and thirty secondhand bookstores. Since the 1960s, the town has taken in discarded tomes from across the anglophone world, and is known as ‘the town of books.’”
“Once the Lord bought ninety-nine tickets but his name wasn’t drawn. If He hadn’t been the Lord, He would have suspected someone was trying to tell Him something.”
The third installment of stories from Joy Williams’s new book 99 Stories of God.
Come, try this exercise:
Focus a beam,
Emptied of thinking, outward through shut eyes
On X, your “god” of long ago.
Wherever he is now the photons race,
A phantom, unrelenting stream,
For nothing lights up. No
Sudden amused face,
No more, no far-out figment to obstruct
The energy—
It just spends
And spends itself, and who will ever know
Unless he felt you aim at him, and ducked
Or you before the session ends
Begin to glow
—James Merrill, “In the Dark”
Art Credit Michal Rovner
Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man
“It was lovely by the water, with its milky sheen at that hour. My attention was then caught by what appeared to be the sight of people running south down the road … shouting, panicked, as if in a disaster film. ‘Ne var?’ I cried to a woman rushing by, in a phrase I figured meant, ‘What’s happening?’
“‘BIBER GAZ!!’ PEPPER GAS!!”
