Issue 32 | Spring 2025
Our latest issue fans the flames of righteousness as we teeter toward a smoke-crazed horizon. We are tracing the minutia of generations through room-sized replicas and reenactments. We are drying laundry on a patchwork of metal sheets. We are back on campus, on the prowl, clawing at mattresses, chasing ghosts and radiance, plagued by absentia. Above all, we are secure in our knowledge that every fact reigns absolute, even its opposite.
AbuSharekh’s “Zeppole (aka Awama)” Selected for Best American Essays
Congratulations to Khalil AbuSharekh, whose essay “Zeppole (aka Awama)” was selected for Best American Essays 2025. “Zeppole (aka Awama)” originally appeared in YIV 30.
Open Wide the Door to Your Heart: The Lost Book of Zeroth by Barbara Harris Leonhard
Review by Peter Mladinic
“The Lost Book of Zeroth is comic, tragic, and ultimately human. The irony is that the book’s first three sections are “peopled by robots:” Sophia, Little Sophia, Little Spark, AI Robot Barbie, Cyborg Guy, AI Robot Amica, AI Robot Optimus, and Nurse Grace.”
Levine’s Mice 1961 Named Pulitzer Finalist
Congratulations to the incomparable Stacey Levine, whose novel Mice 1961 was a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize! We were fortunate enough to publish an excerpt back in issue 27.
Bind yourself to us with your impossible voice, your voice! sole soother of this vile despair.
—Arthur Rimbaud, “Phrases”
Latest Reviews
Featured Interview
Newest Essay
Review: The Confines by Anu Kandikuppa
Review by Kelsey Squire
“Through nuanced, precise, devastating language, Kandikuppa provides readers with stories of yearning and discovery that will remain with them long after finishing.”
The Longest Day of the Year
By Jeff Harvey
“After watching The Gong Show, my younger sister and I enjoyed popsicles made from cherry Kool-Aid that were frozen in a plastic tray Mom received for hosting a Stanley Products home party where she spent twelve dollars on snacks and didn’t make any sales.”
Flaubert’s Heir: A Review of Sleep Decades by Israel Bonilla
Review by Hugh Blanton
“Israel Bonilla’s debut short story collection, Sleep Decades, is a feverish example of erudite style.”
The Abbreviated Kafka
By Ryan Griffith
“Kafka is born. You can trace his origins back to smoke, the stillness of staircases, the pallid sleep of bloodless dreamers.”
A fire of her own
By Pegah Ouji
“When Fatimah tugs at the peeling bark of a one-hundred-year-old eucalyptus tree, one jagged edge pierces her supple thumb, one drop of blood, red and round as Tehran’s setting sun streaking the sky red
Well Situated
By Angela Townsend
“I have not seen that man in a number of years. I wonder if he is still in the crawlspace of his bi-level, with the wind report in one hand and the edicts of AccuWeather in the other. All he wanted was a fair fight with the flukes of Barnegat Bay. You can fish in the rain.”