Our Summer 2019 issue publishes online Monday, July 1, with the print issue following on July 9. The keen reader will notice rabbits abound in Summer 2019—in Michael Hawley’s “Somerville,” Anna Caritj’s “White Angora,” and Graham Barnhart’s “Collateral Rabbits.” What to make of all of these bunnies? And what about all the other wild creatures in the issue? There’s a tortoise in Paul Muldoon’s poem and a pair of swans in Armen Davoudian’s; a wild boar in Lea Carpenter’s story “Candy Cane” canters alongside a stag in Jen Logan Meyer’s “Stop.” And while there are too many birds to name in Margaret Renkl’s excerpt from her memoir Late Migrations, we have a selection of her brother Billy Renkl’s collages that reveal their variegated plumage. Olena Kalytiak Davis takes her racism for a walk in her poem, but that dog’s metaphorical. Confessedly, I find themed issues constrictive and prefer for connections between our stories, poems, and essays to emerge organically. It wasn’t that we were looking for a theme, but one found us anyway, almost magically. Speaking of magic, there’s a séance in Celia Bell’s “Family Oracle,” just one of the story’s many innovations on the classic procedural.
With the exception of Davis, Meyer, and Bell, all of the above-mentioned writers are making their SR debuts. Shawn Vestal’s story “Teamwork” is his first in our pages, but there aren’t any animals in his football tale, unless you count pigskin. We welcome poet Garrett Hongo to the Review (“A Garland of Light”), novelist Chris Bachelder, who contributes a craft essay (“On Patient Writing”), as well as translator, classicist, and Sewanee professor Stephanie McCarter, who meditates on the dangers of taking liberties with depictions of women in the poems of Horace and Ovid in “How Not to Translate the Female Body.” (Her verse translation of the Metamorphoses into English, the first ever by a woman, is forthcoming from Penguin Classics.) Lorrie Moore reviews Joshua Rofé’s docuseries Lorena, about the infamous Lorena Bobbitt case. To read Moore on television is to be treated to great criticism, no matter what the subject—like watching your favorite show with your most brilliant friend and then have her talk about it.
Speaking of brilliant debuts, Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, one of the most anticipated books of the summer, is reviewed by Stephanie Danler. Her reaction to this groundbreaking look at women and desire is certain to spark as many conversations as the book itself. (Taddeo’s Summer 2018 story, “Beautiful People,” won our Andrew Lytle Fiction Prize. We’ll be publishing a new story by her this fall.) Danler’s piece is our online feature from this issue—in front of the paywall, free to all. Enjoy it, share it, buy Taddeo’s book, and go have discussions about it.
Our Summer issue makes for great reading, poolside or otherwise. But to do so, you’ll have to subscribe.