Volume 5,
Issue 1
Fall 2009
The Brutality Issue

The Brutality Issue


From the Editor

From the Editor

A Brutality Suite
Fiction
The Tree (Featured)

The tree threatens to crush the larvae into a yellow paste if the wasps do not do its bidding and find the girl.

I wanted so much to help him then, to ease his way or strike down his enemies, but I held no such earthly powers.

Sailors’ll claim drowning is a pleasant way to go, and perhaps it’s so, providing there is nothing to hold you to this world.

Let the man kill me, he thought. Let him rush the stage and put a gun to my head. Let him tell me to repent.

He offered the men whiskey and quail eggs, maps and divining rods, and, finally, a vision of the township: irrigation, railroads, and a new age.

Nonfiction

An avid birder in search of an elusive thrush hopes to get away from it all, but is instead confronted by his own species’ migration.

Drama

You know what? TV isnt violent at all. You should see the rating on my mind.

Nonfiction

Can a diner be sacred? An erstwhile drifter settles in tiny Alma, Michigan, frequenting the Big Boy and falling for the dry cleaner’s countergirl.

On a trip back to her own private Chicago, the author revisits a past she can’t outride and sees the city anew.

Mount Rushmore: A Triptych

Poetry by Marvin Bell

Poetry by Dorianne Laux

Poetry by Jeanne Emmons

Poetry

Poetry by Robert Cording

Poetry by Elizabeth Bradfield.

Poetry by Julie Larios

Poetry by Julie Larios

Conduction (Featured)

Poetry by Julie Larios

Poetry by Todd Boss

Poetry by Sherman Alexie

Poetry by Mark Wisniewski

Poetry by Bruce Cohen

Interview

National Geographic’s environment editor refutes the demise of journalism and shares his optimism for winning the global warming fight through a bold scientific innovation.

Art

Photographs from Domesticated

Reclamation

“Reclamation” features a contemporary short-story master spotlighting a classic story whose genius has gone unrecognized by the mainstream. We’ll offer readers a chance to revisit the story in our pages. Antonya Nelson makes our inaugural selection, Eudora Welty’s “The Wide Net,” and provides an enthusiastic introduction for it.

Field Study

Life is more believable when it cameos in Jonathan Lethem’s otherworldly fiction. Does his realer-than-real surreality make him the writer for our time?

Map

 A Map by Bret Anthony Johnston

The Strip

Graphic Fiction by Jamie Tanner