ISSUES | summer 2020

An old friend of mine called me in early May to tell me that he was alive, after all. He had caught covid-19 and been on a ventilator, his survival…    read more

I play the tenor sax, and at sixty-five, I’m usually the youngest in this band. We play the oldest of old standards—very little from after the War, plus novelty tunes,…    read more

I sat in a chair, the legs of my jeans pulled up to my knees, as a neurologist poked my leg with a pin. “Can you feel that?” he asked…    read more

The Early Symptoms Storm and understory. How a body learns between the thin years and wet season to take the burning ring in, to keep growing. (Some change in light…    read more

Like the Middle Ages Hell is being stuck in perpetua next door to genius. Like the Middle Ages, whose art and people feel like   first drafts of Renaissance greatness.…    read more

The Neighborhood Girls Catch Lordstown Syndrome but if you want our version, you’ll pay in installments. You’ll neigh in a stall until we come out and free you. We hear…    read more

Every day, I stepped off the school bus on Flat Run Road, and every day, on the other side of the fence, Judy Puckett sat astride a four-wheeler, gunning the…    read more

It was harder than she expected. Some of the patients at the women’s clinic refused to give Intisar their full medical history, as though it were gossip she might turn…    read more

I’d been pinheading on a fishing boat called the Western Bride—scrubbing and prepping so I could fish for free—and that winter I’d made deckhand. This was when I was living…    read more

I would never have answered the phone if I’d known it was going to be Buckwalter on the other end, wheezing through his polyps, wanting to know if I was…    read more

The first setback came when the art store on Fairfax shuttered. Mr. Hashemi, who played Dizzy Gillespie records during store hours, wandered the aisles on the final days of the…    read more

In 1907, when Coles Phillips sold his small New York City advertising agency, he had enough money to set himself up for one month as a magazine illustrator. He convinced…    read more