Where We've Been

Winter 2008                                          VOLUME CXVI, Number 1

The bar was half buffet, half bar, sweltering with the smell of cooked corn and jammed with sweaty men, most of them looking like they'd come here to convince themselves that being divorced was their idea.
 —K.K. Roeder, "Lucky"—

The starting gun went off on 2008 with an issue devoted to fiction. We have an assortment of thoroughbreds in the stable, so to speak, with stories by Andrew Plattner, K. K. Roeder, and Ernest J. Finney. George Garrett salutes Walter Sullivan; Bruce Allen honors the late Grace Paley. Half of the magazine is devoted to criticism: Casey Clabough chronicles four novels out recently, and you will find reviews and essays here on Edith Wharton (Donald Stone), the Russian short story (Ed Minus), William James (Cushing Strout), "The Tates, Ford, and the House of Fiction" (Robert Buffington), Robert Walser (Mark Harman), the terrorist novel (Francis Blessington), the Jewish-American author (Eugene Goodheart), and John Updike (David Heddendorf). Michael Gorra weighs in on what makes a good introduction the best criticism; Ed Minus turns his critical eye to the stages of Manhattan. And not to be wholly overshadowed, Daniel Hoffman, Gladys Swan, David Middleton, Joseph Harrison, and Charles Wyatt make a strong showing in verse. See you at the track!

Fall 2007                                                              VOLUME CXV, Number 4

Like our nation, the Sewanee Review is haunted by war; and our fall issue is a powerful forum on both its devastation and terrible beauty. We offer essays and reviews on warfare itself by Pat C. Hoy II, on the Civil War by Wendell Berry, on Hitler's Wolf's Lair by Daniel J. Meador, on the Cold War and Encounter magazine by George Watson; on war novels by both Leonard Kriegel (Norman Mailer) and Robert Lacy (James Jones); and on the poetry of the Civil War by Helen Pinkerton Trimpi.  This issue offers more stories than usual on the theme—ranging from the Trojan war to the battle of Culloden to the blitz in London to the Vietnam war. In fiction we welcome Rebecca Makkai to the Review and welcome back Russell Fraser, Phillip Parotti, and Algis Valiunas. These war stories will surprise you—as will the poetry by Charlotte Innes, David Middleton, Floyd Collins, and Rawdon Tomlinson.


Thus the long years passed while men as we knew them came to grief.
    —Phillip Parotti, “Blood and Wine”

Summer 2007                                                        VOLUME CXV, Number 3

Lines of blue-black clouds piled up like curses kept
        to ourselves.  Quiet helped us imagine
what we rumbled over these desert roads for
and now wouldn't see . . .
—Peter Makuck, "Out of Aravaipa"

In our summer issue, travel with Edward L. Galligan to Henry Adams's Tahiti; with Henry Hart to the outer reaches of Mongolia; with Richard O'Mara and Captain Bligh on the voyages of the Bounty; with Derek Cohen to Pretoria; with Edward Pickering to Lisbon; with Paula Deitz to Pakistan; and with Charles P. R. Tisdale to the Isle of Iona. And while you're resting, enjoy essays on the best travel writers of our time: Eric Newby (by Sam Pickering), Patrick Leigh Fermor (David Mason), and V. S. Pritchett (Ed Minus); as well as a story by Kent Nelson, and poetry by Brian Cox, Elizabeth McFarland, Ben Howard, Catharine Savage Brosman, Peter Makuck, and David Havird.  Then move between the shores of France, the United States, and the Muslim world with a handfull of excellent reviews touching on travel, travelers, and more.

Spring 2007                                      VOLUME CXV, Number 2 

The Sewanee Review celebrates poetry taking life by the throat with essays by Wendell Berry on Shakespeare, Ann E. Berthoff on Empson, Christopher Clausen on romantic poetry, Denis Donoghue's "Song without Words," David Mason on B. H. Fairchild, George Monteiro on James Weldon Johnson and Ogden Nash, and Dawn Potter (new to our pages) on Milton and the private life • Casey Clabough, Stuart Wright, Robert Benson, and Sam Pickering on southern letters • Alan Bell on the new DNB • Reviews of 21 books by A. Banerjee, William E. Engel, John McCormick, Ed Minus, Phillip Parotti, et al. • Fiction by Josh Goldfaden (another promising newcomer!) • Poetry by Debora Greger, Richard Wakefield, William Bedford Clark, and many others.

Raymond had never known that psychic phone lines existed, and certainly wouldn't have guessed that a phone psychic could be as confident and specific as Pearl. "You will quit your job and move to Detroit," she told someone. "You will find love, but the man will have no thumbs." She was honest to a fault. "You are not following your dreams, nor will  you ever."
—Josh Goldfaden, "Looking at Animals"—

Winter 2007                                 VOLUME CXV, Number 1

From George Core on our first issue of 2007

Henry James, despite the complexities and complications and prolixity of his late style and his late fiction, greatly admired "strong brevity and lucidity," the "ideal of economy." What James says about the "concise anecdote" not only applies to fiction but to the essay in reminiscence and reflection. The stories presented in this issue all possess the virtues of the "compactness of anecdote" that James praises for its marvelous brevity, "like the hard, shining sonnet," "one of the most indestructible forms of composition in general use." James goes on to explain that his procedure in developing "his little situation" is "to follow it as much as possible from its outer edge in, rather than from its centre outward."

  Fiction by Ronald Frame, Nancy Packer, Ron Rash, Barry Targan, and Andrew Wright, along with essays from Merrill Joan Gerber, Eugene Goodheart, Robert Lacy, Mairi MacInnes, John McCormick, Ed Minus, Earl Rovit, and Wilfred Stone reflect the "compactness of anecdote" that James extols.  In addition to reviews of 19 books, you will also find essays by Sam Pickering on field guides, John Gatta on literary narrative, Cushing Strout on Agatha Christie,  Richard O'Mara on H. L. Mencken, and Donald Stone on Matisse.  Brendan Galvin, J. T. Barbarese, Simon Hunt, Diane Thiel, David Livewell, and David Ray contribute poetry. 

I would remind my students . . . that, as human beings, we are all, in some profound sense, composed of words; that, to be more fully sentient and aware, we had to recognize ourselves as words; and that we ought to be reading ourselves constantly as we struggled to write ourselves into richer and more coherent texts.
—Earl Rovit, "On Teaching"—

Fall 2006                                                                     VOLUME CXIV, Number 4

People who say words are good for nothing are fools. Words are blunt tools and sometimes fine ones. They can't heal,
however, what doesn't want to be healed. They can't cut through habitual disappointment.
—Baron Wormser, "Weldon's Song"—

The last issue of 2006 is devoted largely to poetry, with most of the criticism given over to American poets from E. A. Poe and E. A. Robinson to W. D. Snodgrass and Robert Siegel. The Sewanee Review is honored to publish an excerpt from Russell Fraser's forthcoming monumental biography of Shakespeare, alongside an erudite essay by William Harmon on Ezra Pound's equivocal literary legacy. Where else could you find an omnibus review of work by X. J. Kennedy, Helen Pinkerton, and Dick Davis; a reconsideration of Philip Larkin that is as frustrating as it is moving; and a close look at the influence of Poe on the lifework of Richard Wilbur and Daniel Hoffman?

Summer 2006                                                       VOLUME CXIV, Number 3

This fall the Sewanee Review will publish its third special issue devoted wholly to Irish letters—with greater emphasis than its predecessors on the contemporary fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism of Ireland. We are proud to be publishing stories by William Trevor and Sean Padraic McCarthy; poetry by Paddy Bushe, Knute Skinner, Floyd Skloot, Daniel Tobin, et al.; critical essays by James Sloan Allen, Alan Cheuse, and Ben Howard; a supplement on Gaelic and English translation; and chronicles on recent Irish poetry and plays. Anyone engaged by the full breadth of Irish literature will find this issue essential reading. All this and 22 books reviewed!

A spirit of imaginative daring now prevails in Irish writing, tempered by artistic tact and conservative literary form. With only a little exagerration it might be said that contemporary Irish writers have been standing on the table and slapping their teachers (and priests and politicians) for the past two decades. 
—Ben Howard, "Audacious Ireland"—

Spring 2006                                                          VOLUME CXIV, Number 2

A harder story to tell . . . involves the living— those who attend the veteran's awakening. That story—told too often by psychiatrists and others who know only secondhand what really goes on in the minds of the men and women who come home—is a story about misfits.
 —Pat C. Hoy II, from his review of Impact Zone—


The spring 2006 issue is dedicated to the memory of Lawrence Lader (1919–2006), cultural critic, man of letters, and political activist. In this issue on the literature of war you will also find an array of reviews.



Winter 2006                                                            VOLUME CXIV, Number 1

Our first issue of 2006 is dedicated to the memory of Richard Johnson (1937–2006), teacher, scholar, and critic, a contributor to these pages since 1968; and to the memory of Leslie Norris (1921–2006), teacher and man of letters, a contributor since 1980. In this special fiction issue you will find not only some fascinating pieces of historical fiction, but also reviews on Chekhov, Capote, Roth (and others), as well as reviews of recent scholarship on the realist tradition and on the influence of the South and the city on contemporary fiction.