ISSUES | spring 2008

31.1 Cover

31.1 (Spring 2008): "Off the Grid"

Featuring the winners of the 2007 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize and work by John Alford, Christina Hutchins, Cynthia Morrison Phoel, Amos Magliocco, Michael McGriff,  Natalie Sears, Jerald Walker… a review by Chad Parmenter… and a conversation with Charles Baxter.

CONTENT FROM THIS ISSUE

31.1 Cover

Fiction

Mar 01 2008

Never Trust a Man Who —

In the sopping-wet spring of 1995, Sylvia rode the bus to and from Old Mountain more times than she cared to count. Her twin brother, Drago, was in Kyustendil, doing his military service, and she felt obliged to visit her mother twice as often as usual. When she had been a student, she’d caught any bus she could, usually from Poduene Station, which was a filthy place, thick with fumes and overrun by dogs, full of stalls hawking cheap underwear and overripe vegetables.

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Interviews

Mar 01 2008

A Conversation with Charles Baxter

This generation takes in more information daily than my parents and grandparents ever had to. With the Internet and the screen culture, we’re all living in a period of data smog. Part of what it means to write a story now involves noticing that environment. I’m really interested in the way people do not pay attention to certain things anymore. People listen much more selectively than they once did. It’s a feature of our time that you see people walking down the sidewalk talking on the phone. That’s amazing! They’re on the phone! These things remain a feature of our lives that our grandparents would never have believed.

31.1 Cover

Fiction

Mar 01 2008

Whistling in the Louvre

The smell of insanity: acrid, piss-logged wood. The only way they’ll get rid of it, she told us, is to rip up the flooring. The butch could have done it, too, with her bare hands. A jangle of keys, the reassuring click of a tumbler, and we were back in the hall. My wife, with concern in her voice: But one got used to it, right? No, you never do. Twelve years later, sitting on the hospital lawn, I catch a whiff of it in the breeze. I prefer waiting outdoors. Besides, the sun feels good on my face. Fall is in the air. A typical July morning in New Hampshire.

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Nonfiction

Mar 01 2008

Big Jim

In the summer of 1955, the year my father quit his job with the Bankers Trust Company in New York City and bought Big Jim Pond Camps-the year, that is, when my father took a flier and did what he had always wanted to do, which was own and run a hunting and fishing camp in Maine-he discovered after just a couple of months at Big Jim that substantial as the place may have looked to the casual eye, it was tender and vulnerable as a newborn baby, in need of constant coddling and attention if it were not to succumb to the heat, humidity, rot, rust and decay of Maine summers, the crushing weight of winter snows, the rank growth of alders that kept marching, marching against this tiny beachhead of cleared land, threatening to engulf it if they were not constantly beaten back.