This is a revolutionary moment in that everything is changing. But it’s not a revolution, because most of the forces we’re all reacting to (pandemic, injustice, a massive failure to find common moral ground) are not forces put into … Continued
After a briefly too-long period of agonizing over the matter, I’ve concluded that it’s impossible to artistically justify why we, at TLR, wanted to do a John le Carré issue, and nearly impossible to summarize how the magazine you’re reading … Continued
The husband of one of our editors was pursuing a doctorate in Game Theory when I first arrived at the magazine six years ago. I thought then I had never heard of a more evocative subject for advanced … Continued
In the Glutton’s kitchen, there is no food. There is a giant refrigerator, but it’s empty. There are cabinets and cupboards, of course, but where the food should be, there’s nothing, not even a cobweb. The plates are … Continued
Women’s Studies when I was in college was a fairly straightforward, interdepartmental major that, at my school, emphasized continental literary theory and its blunter-edged cousin, identity politics, as well as (interestingly enough) health care from a social-historical perspective. Other colleges, … Continued
Ernest Hemingway met F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in 1925 when they were all living in Paris. The Great Gatsby had just come out and, according to Fitzgerald, “was not selling well but had very fine reviews.” Hemingway pursued the … Continued
Today it seems absurd to say things like “the way things are,” or “these extraordinary times,” or “in times like these.” There aren’t really “times like these,” there is rather this time, Covid time, which redefines itself from one day … Continued
When we first started talking about this issue’s theme, I compiled in my mind a cluster of associations and ideas that emerged from granary: plenitude, agriculture, resources, food, slow steady movement. A series of images: red barns, tall silos, highways … Continued
We are living a feverish moment. Politics are heated to the point of being carnivalesque. The planet is overheated and threatens to extinguish. Tempers are high, mores are in a freefall of correction. Education is on one end a riot … Continued
I’ve been thinking about this theme of Babel Fish for almost a year now, and it’s never stopped seeming like a broad and suggestive portal for the pieces gathered here. For those who aren’t familiar with Douglas Adams’s 1979 novel … Continued
Some thoughts on Chemistry. 1. I’m the kid who loved Chemistry for the wrong reasons. I was dreamily somewhat interested in what we were studying, but I wasn’t very good in the lab. I probably dropped pipettes and fumbled beakers; … Continued
When we (the members of the intern team) first endeavored to identify a theme for the 60th Anniversary issue, we came up with the idea of “Writers Respond”—responding to the times, their environments, major events, etc. It is a popularly … Continued
Time gives generously of its passage, and The Literary Review has been sixty long, prolific years in the making this fall. We’re celebrating our birthday with a special archival issue. We have, at last count (and we did count), published … Continued
For over a year now I’ve been making my way through Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days, a collection of 248 prose fragments spanning two decades’ worth of “loafing, looking, hobbling, sitting, traveling . . .” around the country, in the woods … Continued
I haven’t been in much of a surrendering mood lately, though I’m sure that I thought of surrender as an intriguing and plausible emotion when we first settled on the theme of Uncle for this issue. Art certainly doesn’t exist … Continued
Since we first planned it, I have always thought of this issue’s theme as environmentalist. “I live here”: this is my planet, my legacy, my context, resources, responsibility. But one of the advantages of gestating a literary magazine is that … Continued
I first watched Houseboat late one night while holed up in the stuffy back guestroom of my dad’s house. I’d just had my wisdom teeth out, and dad was nursing me slowly back to a semblance of my old non-puffy … Continued
Last summer our poetry editor emailed me a picture of the Blue Whale of Catoosa, a big goofy roadside attraction off Route 66 in Oklahoma. It was the coup de grace in a non-literary competition for who could dig up … Continued
I was wildly intrigued when first introduced to the concept of the fight-or-flight stress response. I ran it over furiously in my mind, calculating out “the way I was” and “what it all meant about me,” as if it were … Continued
Flight is not the same thing as escape. Flight comes before. We observe flight as crystalline, etched in our minds by the way we fetishize it. Flight brings to mind expansive images of migratory birds instinctively flapping southward and BBC … Continued