• May 20, 2009: "Who's Walking Who?" by Maury Feinsilber

  "In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love," Alfred Tennyson famously wrote ("Locksley Hall") in the late 1830s.  Read what "a young man ‘s fancy" could look like in the late 2000s, in Maury Feinsilber's first-ever published story, "Who's Walking Who?" 

  Maury Feinsilber has been writing fiction for over a dozen years. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Jackie and their dog. He has recently completed his first novel, "A Cosmology of Ink."

• April 8, 2009: "Twilight of Two Poets" by Bettina Drew

  New York in the early '80s is the setting of Bettina Drew's memoir of her brief acquaintances with poets Ted Berrigan and Elizabeth Smart. In this TMR online exclusive, Drew recalls her graduate-school workshop with the self-destructive Ted Berrigan, whose 1963 collection The Sonnets remains a classic of experimental poetry.

  A year or so after Berrigan's death, a fan letter Drew wrote brought about a meeting with the Canadian poet and novelist Elizabeth Smart, known best for her 1945 book-length prose poem By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, about Smart's passionate but hopeless adulterous affair with British poet George Barker. 

  In recognition of National Poetry Month, we bring you Drew's firsthand remembrance of two poets who, in different ways, were both "anti-materialistic and unconventional and believed in love and art."

• November 14, 2008: "Mister Henry's Trousers" by William McCauley

  Various philosophies of mind frequently claim that the mental supervenes on the physical; or, in other words, that there is no change in our mental state without a corresponding change in biology. Sheku, the protagonist of William McCauley's story "Mister Henry's Trousers," illustrates this principle in extremis. In fact, Sheku's elephantiasis-infected testicles could be posited as the real protagonists of the story, for they are among only a small handful of explanations for the tragic overreaching with which Sheku conducts himself.

• October 14, 2008: "Quichè Lessons" by Molly McNett

  "Quichè Lessons" was a piece that was discovered by a first-semester intern here at The Missouri Review through our thousands of mail and online submissions. This keen eye for good writing is one of the many reasons why we at TMR pride ourselves on maintaining a high quality internship where interns are selected through a vigorous screening process for their ability to pick out and discern writing that is acceptable for publication, backing up their decisions with close analysis of the works in consideration. Molly McNett's work was chosen to receive the Peden Prize for this year's best fiction piece featured in The Missouri Review. She will be honored with a reception on Monday, October 20^th at 6:00 PM in Columbia, Missouri.

• September 11, 2008: "A Good Boy" by Cynthia Morrison Phoel

  A troubled teen is the focus of Cynthia Morrison Phoel's "A Good Boy," published in TMR Volume 26, number 3.  We follow Dobrin, the young man struggling with his parents' silence. Ever since his father purchased a satellite dish instead of saving money to heat their home, Dobrin's mother has refused to speak to her husband. Set in Bulgaria, the story explores poverty, marital issues, and one boy's attempt to become a man despite his father's shortcomings.

• July 23, 2008: "'06" by David Ohle

  From start to finish, David Ohle's "'06" seems set in a familiar landscape, but one is immediately at a loss to account for that familiarity.  For only in the sense that its characters speak English and gradually reveal themselves to be unmistakably human does this tale, at first glance, retain any vestige of a known reality.  But Ohle's scope is broad, and on the whole satirical, giving us leeway to read parallels between the social structures we know and the social warps and fissures we find on the page.  "‘06" belongs to that select group of highly literate science fiction stories that are able, miraculously, to speak to us about our lives in our own language on wildly unpredictable and fantastic terms.

• June 1, 2008: "Birdie" by Mark Wisniewski

  Gender benders have a rich history in literature. Most notable might be Shakespeare's Twelfth Night with its comical swapping and confusion that occurred. In today's society gender portrayal has become even more prevalent, as fashion and science allow us to blur the lines more than ever before. In his short story, "Birdie," Mark Wisniewski uses women's basketball to show how his characters define themselves sexually and as skilled athletes.

• April 9, 2008: "Roan" by Diza Sauers

  Animals figure prominently, even disturbingly, in Diza Sauers' story "Roan."  Not content to fixate only on the way humans deal with death at an emotional pitch, "Roan" employs a harsh naturalism that reduces death to its biological, or animal, level.

Related Pages

• Online Submissions
• Contest Guidelines
• Sample Issues

Our Current Issue

32.1 Spring 2009

Featuring the Winners of the 2009 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize

As well as work by: Dwight Allen, Anthony Doerr, Daniel Donaghy, Christina Hutchins, Adam Prince, Deborah-Anne Tunney, and Lisa Williams.

With an interview with Ellen Bryant Voigt.

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