“You have to be wealthy in order to be great.” – Donald Trump, campaign speech, Bismarck, North Dakota, May 26, 2016 In The Power Elite, his 1956 study of the powerful’s manipulation of the powerless, C. Wright Mills, the American sociologist, sounded what would probably be his most devastating critique of ingrained assumptions about wealth: […]
Essays
The Gospel of Dearth
Changing
by Erinn Seifert
You lie awake, tired and lonesome underneath a horrifyingly new patchwork blanket of your dead grandfather’s old clothing. The boy dropped you off thirty minutes ago, and you walked the half mile up your secluded driveway in the middle of the last dark hour before dawn broke. The pine trees buzzed with morning birds and […]
What Kind of Parent Lets a Thirteen-Year-Old Cancel Her Bat Mitzvah?
by Leonard Kress
1. My favorite episode of Jill Soloway’s tragi-comic Transparent focuses on the family’s youngest daughter, Ali Pfefferman, who at age 13 refuses to celebrate her Bat Mitzvah. This is no small matter, since her mother has spent thousands on preparations—food, invitations, reception, booze, etc., and she’s both horrified and humiliated by the prospect of canceling. At first, […]
Red Memory
by Christian Sorace
After his collection of over 200 Chairman Mao souvenir buttons was stolen a few weeks prior, on February 25th, 2012, 71 year-old Li Decai used a red belt to hang himself from a beam two meters high in a shed in his bean and carrot field.1 Li Decai became a local celebrity in the county-town […]
Four Letters
by Michael Karl (Ritchie)
Dear Petronius, I used to climb to where the Latin texts were shelved, on the top floor of a very tall building appropriately called Acres of Books. Shuttered in that stifling room, with dust baking in the light of a lone sealed window during a particularly humid summer day, I rummaged among the books to […]
A Quiet Fighter
by Greg Hlavaty
When our group arrived at the put-in to the Chattooga River, Cathy, our veteran guide, was first to exit the car and get us unloading the paddling gear. All of us were rookie staff at the Nantahala Outdoor Center (NOC), a major rafting company in western North Carolina, but my girlfriend Jenn and I were the […]
What I Don’t Know about My Mother
by Graham Guest
(1) I don’t know her real, legal name: her name at birth. Once, I thought it was Marion Bush, but that turned out to be wrong. Oddly, my dad doesn’t know, either. (2) I don’t know who her parents, grandparents, etc., were. (3) I don’t know if she had any siblings. (4) I don’t know exactly […]
What I Know about My Mother
by Graham Guest
(1) I know she was born on January 19, 1923, and she will die in the Fall of 2008, at eighty- five years old. (2) I know she was originally from New Jersey, maybe near Teaneck. (3) I know there was a black and white photograph taken of her naked on a leopard-skin rug in […]
Eternally Yours
by Michael Gills
There’s a story that used to get told, Lara, of how my maternal grandfather lost his leg in a woodcutting accident and the unlucky events that followed. It most often starts in Danville, Arkansas, where Mama’s people—the Stepwells—were from, that brutal summer of 1952 when she was about to turn twelve, your age now. I […]
Close Call With Siberian Kick-boxers
by Robert Cowan
1. being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage The taciturn kick-boxers and I are exhausting the path of light through the trees, careening down a crevasse of road carved through remarkably straight conifers, when a full black vehicle much larger than our aluminum can charges us directly until […]