Blood Relations

When one sets about doing harm, the people most likely to be hurt are the ones across the table, if only by reason of proximity. Look up quotes on the word “family,” and much of what comes up is either sarcastic or humorous.

Weird

It doesn’t take a genius to point out how weird life can be or, to put it more clearly, how proximate the zones of the normal and the strange can be at almost any moment in our lives. The strange is just an instant or a membrane away, as this issue’s authors point out.

Legacy

Much of the writing in this issue calls to mind the laws of motion in human life: the power of momentum, mass in motion, as well as friction and inertia in forming the legacies of our lives. What we inherit and how we are acted upon by the world can sometimes influence our direction and fate as much as free will.

Significant Other

I sometimes wonder why the best literature so often has a element of unlikelihood: why one of the great novels of the twentieth century is an 800-page description of an ad salesman and a student walking around one day in Dublin; or why one of the defining American classics is about living in a shack on a lake for a couple of years; or why one of the finest English lyric poems is a depiction of an antique urn in a museum. Why is the most memorable stuff so often the miraculous transformation of a seemingly limited subject?

Peril

When he was a professor at the University of Missouri, psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett began to wonder whether there wasn’t something identifiably different about people in their twenties-if it wasn’t in some ways a unique stage of life.

Blindsided

Because much of the literature about this subject is by nature corrective-offering solutions easy answers and descriptions of “stages”-it is oddly refreshing and useful to see an author describe and fully recognize the derangement of grief and trauma. At least someone who is suffering such agony knows she isn’t the only crazy person out there.

The Shadow

While Jung gave a name to an amoral and potentially “dark” side of the mind, the idea is of course as old as dragons, devils and demons. The pulp fiction, comic-book series and radio show The Shadow became an often-imitated model for popular dramatizations of “what evil lurks in the hearts of men” and the trickster figure who fights against it. Several of the contributors to this issue explore different corners of the dark or destructive forces in human nature.

Crash

The differences between generations-the Lost Generation, the Silent Generation, the Baby Boomers, Generations X, Y and Z (where do we go next?)-is a popular subject full of questionable simplifications. Sweeping statements about age groups in different eras are at best elusive, due to both sudden changes in history and the diversity at any given time among locales, classes, ethnicities and personalities. Lately one of the often discussed issues concerning the Millennial Generation is whether they suffer from hyper-parenting, with their perennially in-touch parents not giving them enough freedom to develop independence. They need to actually be allowed to make a few mistakes, the argument goes, in order to be inoculated against what to avoid.

Uncharted

In Fiona McFarlane’s Jeffrey E. Smith Prize-winning story “Exotic Animal Medicine,” a young Australian woman veterinarian in England undergoes a disturbing set of incidents on the day that she marries her English boyfriend and presumably starts a new life. Midway …

The Questionable Past

In the company of old friends, what surprises me is not forgetting shared experiences or remembering them slightly differently but the fact that we have anything like the same memories. Perhaps that is a simple confession of aging. Yet psychologists have grown increasingly skeptical about the human ability to remember and accurately recount the distant past, just as historiographers are dubious about our understanding of history. This declining faith in our grasp of “what really happened” has taken a particularly dramatic dive over the past century.

Demons

Cheever’s life suggests how often not just writers but most of us suffer from demons. Whether or not they are as dramatic as Cheever’s, they can be both commonplace and cumbersome in our lives. The modern word “demon” comes from a proto-European term for “god” or “celestial,” yet its different usages over time refer to a variety of hidden powers or forces, from the higher self of Greek philosophy to the destructive demons of medieval Christianity. For Freud, demons were impulses arising from repression. Modern philosophers use the term “Morton’s demon” to describe our surprisingly frequent tendency not to see what belies our currently held biases.

The Uncertain Witness

…For these reasons, literature can sometimes describe highly charged events more compellingly and with a truer sense of emotion than history or even eyewitness narratives. By admitting to its own fiction and slanted reconstruction, literature paradoxically serves as the best of witnesses.

A Hundred Visions and Revisions

Several of the pieces in this issue reflect directly or indirectly on artists and their potential influence on us. Cheryl Strayed’s memoir “Munro Country” tells of her own amazement as a young writer when her model author, Alice Munro, wrote …

Hope

So remember — the guy who paid for the American Revolution went broke in real estate speculation, inspiring the bill that will keep you out of jail when you go broke. Be happy.

Pick Your Poison

Why are flaw and conflict so basic to literature? Literature, like sport, starts by meaningfully enacting conflict and somehow dealing with it. Conflict is basic to literature because it is basic to life. Without it, the airplane usually won’t fly. We are meaning-making creatures with little tolerance for chaos. It’s a platitude but also true that literature, like religion, gives shape and meaning to the struggle of living.

Agonists

Sisyphus is a mythical example of one agile enough to defy fate, at least for a while. He is frequently thought to be an archetype of hopelessness and the futility of life because he was ultimately condemned to an eternity of pushing the rock up the hill and watching it roll down again. Yet Sisyphus was a powerful rogue, the founder of a city, successful in love with mortals and immortals, capable of talking his way out of trouble with angry gods and once even out of Hades. A destiny of ongoing effort for such a resolute heavy hitter seems a natural fate-and also not a bad deal.

Off the Grid

Going off the grid can result not just in changes of behavior and attitude but also in discovery. Many of the breakthroughs in science and technology have been the outcome of one kind of research or work-often with a modest goal-becoming something that no one could ever have guessed.

Foreword: “Exposed”

Along with a surprising number of other artists, George Grosz thrived in the unlikely world of the Weimar Republic. His cartoons and watercolors pierce the facades of society, government, the military and the church. They exemplify the fervid bohemian moment between the wars in Germany and Austria, also remembered in such work as Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, which was later to be the source of the play Cabaret.

Foreward: Love and Loneliness

Love and loneliness, paradox, uncertainty, nonfiction necessarily tinged with fiction–this issue’s authors offer the lumpiness, conflict, illogic, and ambiguity of life as lived.

What a Writer Does Best

The full text of this foreword is not currently available online.

One winter evening many years ago, some friends and I were entertaining ourselves with a game of free association. We were to respond without hesitation to whatever word or phrase the questioner put to us. Instead about asking about the obvious things– favorite hobbies, best moview, happiest moments, etc.– my friend was being philosophical. To me he said, “Literature,” and my unthinking response was, “Black and white.”

Is the Short Story Dead?

A friend recently asked me whether I believed that the short story was a living art or whether it had gone the way of vinyl records. I told her that I knew a guy who listened only to vinyl. This music lover is in fact a music fiend with a twenty-some-thousand-dollar sound system to play his old records. It occurred to me later, though, that my friend and I were mixing up categories in the way that art pundits too often do.

What a Writer Does Best

The best writers don’t always stand in easy proximity either with “what’s happening” or with their own natural subjects or voices. What they do best isn’t necessarily either fashionable or–contrary to theories about following one’s bliss–fun.

A Sense of Place

One of the major themes of this prize issue is winning not money or power but, more importantly, a sense of place and belonging. Understanding where one is, fitting in, finding roles, connecting with others and with the rest of nature–these are primordial themes not just in literature but in all of art.

Out of Bounds

Sometime in the future, the manners, conventions, and even some of the health practices of the early twenty-first century are going to seem as quaint as those of two hundred years ago. This gives me a moment of cheer. If only I could therefore drink six glasses of wine, light up some cigs, declare myself a rebel and enjoy. If only it were that easy.

Losing It

We sometimes assume that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a time when thinkers became sensitized to the struggle and uncertainty of nature and life. It truly was one of the most creative and turbulent periods in the history of thought. Darwin, Marx, Freud and Einstein all depicted not just conflict but systems of disparity between what seems to be and what is. In literature as well as the sciences both the obvious and the hidden struggles of life were being looked at with new intimacy and understanding.