Ultimately, it’s Tracker’s sensitivity, his depth of feeling, that raises Black Leopard, Red Wolf above simpler fantasy. The author shows endless sophistication, whether his players are making love or going for the kill.

How do we live with the damage we’ve inherited? How do we rewrite our own stories? For me, there’s a self-destructive drive that feels like a birthright, one that I’ve indulged freely in for most of my life. There came a point—around the time of “Engrams”—when I saw an opportunity to change, or to shift.

The Winter 2019 issue of the Sewanee Review publishes online this coming Monday, January 7, the print version mails on January 9th, and we couldn’t be more excited about it. It’s the first of the new volume, our 127th, and the first of the new year. But the thrills of publishing a magazine come in stages, from acceptance of the poetry and prose that comprise the issue to seeing the magazine in first proofs.

With the season of giving (last-minute and otherwise) approaching, our staff rounded up some favorite books that may make a thoughtful gift for someone on your list.

Reading Lucia Berlin has always been, at least to this reader, an experience of immersion in the author’s life. Her autofiction is so compelling, so alive, and so, well, autobiographical, that it can be difficult to separate the Marias, Maggies, Mayas, Lauras, and Lisas who populate Berlin’s work from the author herself—like untangling a necklace with a straight pin.

The Sewanee Review was thrilled to have work from its 2017 volume recognized in two prominent annual anthologies, Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. These publications nominate a distinguished writer in the respective genre to select twenty of the best pieces of fiction and nonfiction published by literary magazines nationwide. Best American Short Stories was selected by novelist and essayist Roxane Gay, while the Best American Essays were chosen by Pulitzer Prize-winner Hilton Als.

Dubus’s fiction is populated by people who’ve made big mistakes, the kind that come to define a life: murderers, rapists, absentee parents, lapsed Catholics, and whiskey priests. But the most self-lacerating introspection occurs among the most common of sinners—adulterers.

Future Perfect is best initially understood through its title, which strikes at the heart of anyone like me who suffered through, or, more rarely, relished, high-school Latin. In Indo-European languages, verbs conjugated into the future perfect tense translate into English with the prefix “will have . . .” as in I will have read the book by then.

Laura van den Berg’s second novel, The Third Hotel, piques our interest on the basis of setting alone: Cuba just after the easing of US restrictions. That’s only the first exotic touch. The protagonist, Clare, has come to Havana for a movie festival featuring an edgy new horror flick, and swiftly finds herself in a horror trope, coming upon her own private zombie: her dead husband Richard.