The Missouri Review

Good news this week for the English language, which welcomes into usage the term opposite marriage, courtesy of Miss California 2009, Carrie Prejean.
Political affiliation and current events knowledge aside, Prejean should be commended for having achieved accidentally through some miracle of ineloquence what many of us strive to do each waking hour: invent and [...]

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As study-dwellers, we spend a lot of time in spaces surrounded by paper. Our desktops, shelves, armrests, and pretty much every vertical surface is piled high with magazines, stacks of ungraded student papers, books, lists, diagrams . . . and that’s okay. We’re comfortable here.
But so are bugs. Thus, there are really only two [...]

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Bad news this week for Steve Martin, whose play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, was banned from being performed at an Oregon high school because some parents complained about its content. Martin, various news agencies report, has offered to pay for the play to be produced off-campus. I recommend reading the actual letter he sent [...]

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It was downright nippy last weekend here in Columbia, Missouri, but that didn’t keep my fiancee Neesha, her parents, and me away from the True/False Film Festival. Turns out, nothing gets a family talking like a solid piece of nonfiction filmmaking. We saw a whole bunch of films. Here’s the roundup on our favorites.
Loot
Remember how Bill [...]

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Bad news this week for people awed by the final frontier and the second-to-final frontier, which are apparently getting a tad crowded. The much-discussed collision of two satellites in low Earth orbit and the just-disclosed deep sea nuclear submarine fender-bender in the Atlantic Ocean indicate that it might be a good time to turn the [...]

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Word has it that our stand at AWP, along with several of our competent, cheerful interns and many innocent Chicagoans, was nearly torn apart by the clamoring throngs who had poured into the conference in the hopes of meeting me, only to find out that I didn’t go.
I’d like to take a moment to apologize. 
I’m sorry, folks. Thanks for making [...]

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Bad news this week for advocates of the apostrophe, and no, O gentle reader, I’m not talking about this kind of apostrophe — it’s doing just fine — I’m talking about the captain of contraction, the prince of possession, the hovering hero who hauls “he’ll” out of “hell.” Officials in the English city of Birmingham have decided [...]

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Good news this week for people who like holograms. An article just out in New Scientist says we all just might be living in one.
… I know, right? As I read the article I noticed my face mimicking the expression of the tiny framed Shakespeare hologram I have on my wall here, which I purchased from [...]

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The Ghost of Christmas Future, everyone will agree, is the most awesome and hardcore Christmas spirit of all the spooks and specters in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
His spectral cohorts, Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, are like a couple of hippie high school teachers, whereas he’s like that tyrant prof who ruined your 4.0 GPA in grad school.  They’re like, [...]

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Frank Gannon, in his inspiring essay “English 99: Literacy Among the Ruins,” writes about trying to teach basic writing to an assortment of college freshmen that consisted mostly of bored/oblivious white suburbanite traditional students mixed in with a few shell-shocked Bosnian refugees.
In the piece, which originally ran in Harper’s, Gannon describes how he taught that “writing was an activity more than something that can [...]

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Unlike some things — the UK lottery, apparently — you can’t win our audio contest if you don’t play. If you’re going to play, though, play to win!
The deadline is Dec. 1, and I know what you’re thinking. Not enough time, right? Then you learn that the payout is as much as $1500 for first prize, and you’re like, [...]

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I just read an article on newly discovered sea creatures that reminds me of a wonderful little essay by Lewis Thomas. The essay’s titled “Seven Wonders.” Everybody should read it. It appears in Lewis’s collection, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, a title that fits rather nicely with our latest List of the Week.
My first encounter with “Seven Wonders” was as an undergraduate at [...]

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Want to get noticed in a good way? Get out there and buy a sled. 
Today I discovered the power of the sled-bearer to bring joy to the masses. Everyone pays attention when a shopper carries a sled through a store. Some people even pause to compliment the sled and speculate as to the amount of fun that will be had with [...]

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My apologies, folks. My TMR blog this week was going to be a comic strip, but Berkeley Breathed — my favorite cartoonist ever — is retiring his Opus character tomorrow, and, frankly, I’m just too sad.
If I may, a few words in remembrance of a beloved friend.
Farewell, gentle penguin. Many will remember you as [...]

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Time to address a seldom discussed but alarmingly common trend I’ve noticed in creative nonfiction submissions — a specific kind of essay I call the Embarrassing Restroom Adventure.  
The details of ERAs vary widely, limited only by the number of ways going to the bathroom can go horribly wrong. Still, almost all ERAs follow the same basic trajectory: narrator enters restroom and gets comfortable; [...]

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Here’s a question for you, writer. What do you keep in your writing toolkit these days?
What materials do you keep within arm’s reach when you work? What does your reference library look like? What, in other words, is vitally important to your job as a writer?
Do you still use your trusty old print thesaurus, or do [...]

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Good news this week for transparency, which is poised to make a huge comeback in the wake of global economic apocalypse.
This is one of those weird moments in history right after the words, Oh, busted! echo through the collective human consciousness, when it’s still unclear just how much deception there’s been, but all parties tentatively resolve to [...]

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Here at The Missouri Review, we strive to publish captivating poems, stories, and essays. We hope our readers enjoy them, find them enlightening, provocative, and moving. Often when we publish something, we hope the reader finds it somehow relatable. 
As the 2008 presidential election draws near, though, I’ve found myself rethinking the term, “relatable.” It seems all the major players in the [...]

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It’d been one of those days when my mind was like a personal check from a grad student: unlikely to clear. I stepped outside to give it a try nonetheless.

I left my office and walked across campus toward the little coffeeshop in the library, figuring that if the stroll didn’t do the trick, a couple doses of caffeine [...]

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Lately, I’m totally fascinated by the spaces where people write. This was demonstrated today when my friend Marybeth called to tell me she finished the story she’s been working on for the last year and a half.
“Where did you write it?” I asked, forgetting that I probably should have congratulated her first.
She thought for [...]

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Good news this week for planet Earth, which was not destroyed when CERN turned on its new Large Hadron Collider.
The enormous, expensive, subterranean experiment gave citizens around the globe cause for conCERN (see what I did there?), especially after some experts warned that the device could create a microscopic black hole that would absorb the [...]

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Bad news this week for author Stephanie Meyer, who had previously distributed a few rough copies of the manuscript of her latest novel, Midnight Sun, and was disappointed to learn that … bum bum BUM! — you guessed it — somebody put one on the Internet.
The novel would have been the last installment of Meyer’s Twilight series, which, as far as I [...]

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A little light reading. That’s a good way to describe the idea behind an item which appeared in Harper’s index in July, which reported that all the information transferred through the Internet in 2006 weighed .00004 oz.
Thinking back to junior high science class, when we learned that protons and neutrons have masses and weights and [...]

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