The Missouri Review

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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