The Missouri Review

But I especially love how what looks at first like a relatively straightforward paragraph of summary is actually a series of small mysteries that raise key questions in the reader’s mind, questions that make us want to keep reading.

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Mathew Chacko’s “Ivy: A Love Story” (from TMR 31.2) is a vivid portrait of a grief-haunted man redefining the boundaries of his world after the loss of his wife.  Vibrant imagery, a dynamic Indian setting and a protagonist steeped in a lifetime of memories make Chako’s story a compelling and layered read.

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Saw Georgeanne Nixon and Governor Nixon at the movies yesterday. Georgeanne is a serious and involved supporter of the arts. Didn’t get a chance to talk to them after the show but wonder what they thought of Winter’s Bone, which might be interpreted as a “negative” portrait of drug dealers in the Missouri Ozarks. At [...]

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No, really! Galerie de Difformité is the forthcoming novel by Missouri alum (and friend of TMR) Gretchen Henderson.  Cribbed from the Lake Forest College website: “With the head of a novel and the body of a poem, Galerie de Difformité is a book that avoids any simple category.  A mysterious bone with a heart-shaped hole. [...]

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Today’s podcast presents both of the winning entries in the Voice-Only Fiction category. First place: Josh McDonald earns first place in the flash fiction, voice-only category with his submission, “Lost.” It’s a comic, surreal story of a madman on a bus shelter roof and the elderly woman who finds him. McDonald is a writer, musician [...]

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About rewriting and editing the American playwright Tennessee Williams said, “You have to murder all your little darlin’s.” It’s been known for several decades that the editor Gordon Lish did more than slay a few precious lines in Raymond Carver’s 1981 story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. In fact, it [...]

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