The Sewanee Review – America's longest-running literary quarterly

Fiction

One Hundred Million Years of Solitude

Ben Fountain

Dawn was best for running in the dog days, before the sun began its charbroil job and the ozone hit lung-scarring levels. Better for running, and such sights you saw in the glimmering murk—flashes of coyote along the culverts and creeks, a family of foxes crossing the street, an owl gliding past with some furry thing wriggling in its claws.

Fiction Online Feature

Boys Go to Jupiter

Danielle Evans

Before this winter, if you had said Confederate flag, Claire would have thought of high-school beach trips: rows and rows of tacky souvenir shops along the Ocean City Boardwalk, her best friend Angela muttering they know they lost, right? while Claire tried to remember which side of the Mason-Dixon line Maryland was on.

Nonfiction

On Stanley Elkin

Francine Prose

The choice of what to read at Stanley's memorial seemed . . . preordained. The only passage I could read, the only passage I wanted to read, was from "The Making of Ashenden," a novella that is among my favorites of Stanley’s works. Specifically, I wanted to read the scene in which the hero, Brewster Ashenden, fucks a bear.

Poetry

Brood

Donika Kelly

For slow months at rest in the hole // I’d made in myself / A frozen ground / A ground in thaw // I mean / Spring is coming // I mean / I push the wet dirt with my mandible / I mean jaw / Jaw / Y’all // I know I am not a nymph in exhumation // but would you please explain / this half-remembered light

Nonfiction

Quitters

Nick Paumgarten

The hockey parent has an internal clock. The countdown kicks in when you get to the rink, an hour before puck drop. Another winter morning: the boys, in matching sweats, performed their warmups in the parking lot, while their coach, a heavyset Czech, presided with a baleful glare that even the kids knew was only half-serious.

Poetry

Anecdote

Rebecca Wolff

Katelyn is a history buff. / Air Force brat in the airport / spa, she’s never flown / anywhere. Nowhere. She likes to learn / about things, she says, the / things / that happened and you can / find out weird stuff about / them.

Fiction

The Rent Manual

Sidik Fofana

Little bit of everybody here. Young people with GEDs. Old people with arthritis. Folks with child-support payments, uncles in jail, aunties on crack, cousins in the Bloods, sisters hoein. That’s what everybody wanna concentrate on.

Nonfiction

Emerson’s Eyes

Louisa Thomas

That phrase: “I become a transparent eye-ball.” Is there another line in the American canon that is at once more alluring and more repulsive? It is evocative, but of what? For starters, it makes no sense. There is no way to visualize a transparent eyeball—let alone a man becoming one.

Nonfiction

Letters Home from College: The Making of a Writer

Merrill Joan Gerber

In 1962 we crossed the country in an ancient truck my father bought to transport the contents of his antique store from Florida to California. On the nights that my mother and sister slept in a motel, my father kept watch on a blanket under the truck to protect his cargo.

Poetry

And They Lived

Taije Silverman

Plutarch recounted the life of Solon “at a time when history / was by no means an academic discipline” wrote someone on Wikipedia, / while Solon wrote a law forbidding slaves from being gymnasts / because his mother’s friend’s son was a gymnast and a slave // who wasn’t in love with Solon back.

Fiction

First Times

Michael Dickman

Nine or ten years old, we made our nervous way a short distance into each other’s bodies and every word I ever used to describe anything fell apart inside my mouth and around her tongue. How did we know to use our tongues? Small birds know as much. They reach out for their mamas with their tongues going cheep cheep.

The Conglomerate

125 Years of SR

The Fall 2017 issue of the Sewanee Review, due out in October, is the magazine’s five-hundredth, and marks the close of its 125th volume. In celebration of the anniversary, the issue contains images from our archives that touch on the Review’s history; however, the majority of its pages attest to the conviction that the best way to protect this legacy is to look to the future.

Craft Lecture

The Gravestone and the Commode

Richard Russo

Most people agree that humor can’t be taught. Someone already inclined toward a comic view of the world can sharpen that vision by working on timing and technique, and writers whose comedy runs out of control, diminishing their work’s potential for seriousness, can learn restraint. But people who lack a sense of humor are unlikely to develop one through practice.

Nonfiction

Maurice’s Blues

Kim McLarin

The rest of it, quickly: Maurice’s hanging head as they guide him, shackled—fucking shackled!—from the stand. My sister’s face as we walk, numb, next door to the Sheriff’s Department to speak to Maurice before we leave. The strange, smiling kindness of the woman behind the glass: she signs us in and directs us to plastic chairs, to our vigil.