Features
—December 2012
Really—I don’t know what the meaning or purpose of life is. But it looks exactly as if something were meant by it.
—Carl Jung
i.
The Truth will make us miserable, Rick Warren says. That sounds
I miss the grain of Ralph, and the grain
of Ed, and Trixie’s grain, and especially
the grain of Alice, whose pretty, pointed body
would never, ever land on the moon. Alice
was earthbound; Alice was of
the street, and
I.
On any afternoon in Stein’s grocery store parking lot in Troy, Montana, a truck—American made, four-wheel drive, dented and dirt-streaked, axles riding high—will pull in and park. A young sawyer will jump from the cab. His beard is trimmed …
Read MoreIn 2007 I published a political novel. I’d never intended to write it.
Until I was in my late thirties, I kept my political concerns segregated from my creative writing. Of course, they crept in anyway, but always indirectly and …
Read MoreThe weather? How do you argue about that? This was nothing about money or alcohol or Clayton, their son-in-law. Or trivia—whether, say, Eugene McCarthy ever really supported Reagan. On this winter day, he’ d maundered aloud about the heat of …
Read MoreSuppose you are walking along a path in the woods, and as you round a bend you suddenly encounter a grizzly bear, just a few feet away, lumbering in your direction. How do you react? Before you have time to …
Read MoreSpring is finally returning to Athens, Georgia, with dogwood, azalea and, more to the point here, the annual Georgia Review Earth Day Celebration. This year’s guest speaker is Scott Russell Sanders, a writer of skill and probity—and of the …
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This beautiful head, this whole body, like a Byzantine empress on the mosaics of Ravenna—and this nose, this mouth—and the eyes, they too, those wonderful eyes—all these the worms will eat. And nothing will remain, absolutely nothing!
—Hodler, letter to