The Sewanee Review – America's oldest continuously published literary magazine.

Fiction

Family Physics

Catherine Lacey

I began moving from home to home, all of them prefurnished, short-term rentals, trying on this kind of life, that kind of life, waiting either to find the right kind of life or to stop believing there was a right life and just settle on one.

Craft Lecture Online Feature

The Autobiography of My Novel

Alexander Chee

My first novel was not the first one I started. It was the first one I finished. Looking at my records, I count three unfinished previous novels; pieces of one of them went into this first one. But the one I finished, I finished because I asked myself a question. What will you let yourself know? What will you allow yourself to know?

Poetry

On the Fourth Day

Heather McHugh

Suddenly everything / Stayed the same. // We who had called / The water blue // Refocused on our lenses. / We who had seen the island move / Reunderstood our oars. / The sand / Composed some drumlins in the sound // So we revised the sky.

Nonfiction

On the Transit of Toledo

Joshua Cohen

Maybe you get somewhat drunk or high or lusty one night and in that flush of excitement you find yourself calling this book down—you call this book down to the page or screen. You call this book down to its wording. As surely you know, this is where the work begins.

Fiction

Beautiful Young Women

Christina Wood Martinez

Beautiful young women stretch their bodies along the cliffs to catch the sun. Their wet bathing costumes, the thimblefuls of water in their navels, begin to dry as the sun rises and warms the air. Seagulls eye their wiggling toes. “What a day for a swim,” someone says, though they swim every day.

Nonfiction

The Minister of Ministrations

Monica Black

As the war came to its ultraviolent conclusion, people sought out experts in what-comes-next: clairvoyants, astrologists, numerologists, palm and card readers. Far from yielding clarity, available predictions only sowed more confusion. Stalin would be murdered, some said; the Germans would occupy England.

Fiction

Mermaid River

Alexia Arthurs

My mother says my stepfather’s job is very good money in this country, and nothing to be ashamed of, and she says this to convince the both of us, and to meet our surprise, because where we come from, nobody with any shame would willingly collect people’s garbage for a living.

Poetry

When I Say Jesus Was My Boyfriend

Erin Adair-Hodges

I mean only that I talked about him / to all my friends and did the things / I thought he’d like because I knew / he loved me but mostly in the way / we know at fifteen that everyone we love / will someday be dead, and we will be dead, / and an army flying some future flag / will build an outpost on what was once the mall / where our parents dropped us off . . .

The Conglomerate

Review: The Overstory by Richard Powers

John Domini

This then is the main action, the forest that emerges from the trees. Amid the many lines of development, the many paths to protest, one of the miracles is how intensely we root for these people. Perhaps the most sympathetic is the Vietnam veteran Douglas Pavlicek, a kind of Holy Fool.

Poetry

On an Overgrown Path

Simon Armitage

I like this place, where a blimp crash-landed, / where ley lines cross, / where a trapdoor leads to an underground church / hewn from a seam of coal, where the sterling silver shoes / from a lost team of sacred horses / are still occasionally unearthed.

Fiction

King Me

Austin Smith

She tries the flashlight, but the batteries are dead. The beam is just dust in her palm. In the strange storm light glowing through a ground-level window, Mary cannot help but see, on the shelves at the foot of the stairs, the preserves of old gardens floating forever, suspended as if in formaldehyde.

Archival Content Interview

A Conversation with John Jeremiah Sullivan

Sewanee Review

My habits are a mess, everything is a mess, until a certain moment—usually related to a deadline—when a shape starts to form in the middle of it all, like that one nasty coffee cup on your desk that finally starts to host some spores. You know what I mean? Something has quickened. The mold, in this case, is an electronic text document.

Poetry

Aubade

Glyn Maxwell

When you’re / not here / and leaving blank the page / would say so better than these moans of waking, // before I / know my self as stuff at all, / when nothing has transpired, or could, or will // then I’m some / Adam / fumbling in a wood / made for god-knows-what beyond the word / I have / for Eve— / the word I have for Eve / is rising to its place . . .

Archival Content Poetry

Departure of the Ghost

Sylvia Plath

This is the kingdom of the fading apparition, / The oracular ghost who dwindles on pin-legs / To a knot of laundry, with a classic bunch of sheets // Upraised, as a hand, emblematic of farewell. / At this joint between two worlds and two entirely / Incompatible modes of time, the raw material / Of our meat-and-potato thoughts assumes the nimbus / Of ambrosial revelation. And so departs.