The Threepenny Review

Xavier Blackwell-Lipkind studies comparative literature at Yale and serves as managing editor for the Yale Literary Magazine. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Five Points, and West Branch. Shaun Cammack is a writer from Appalachia. Sarah Curtis's essays have been published in the anthology River Teeth, the L.A. Review of Books, the Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Simone Di Piero's most recent book of poems is The Complaints. He lives in San Francisco. Richard Ford is the author of The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Canada, Between Them, and many other works of fiction and nonfiction. Eliza Gilbert is an undergraduate at Vassar College. She was born and raised in New York City. Jane Hirshfield's tenth collection of poetry, The Asking: New & Selected Poems, will be out in September from Knopf. A former chancellor…

YEARS AGO, when I was still a neurotic child and not, as I am now, a neurotic adult, I asked my mother whether I would have to swallow for the rest of my life. I remember where I was standing: at the top of the stairs, just outside the bathroom, the door open behind me. And I remember that when my mother said yes, I was overwhelmed by a sense of existential dread. There was something frightening to me about the idea of needing to repeat something, of that repetition being a precondition for—a defining factor of—life. Later, in middle school, I was diagnosed with Tourette syndrome. Though I have had many tics—new ones introduce themselves every so often, then are replaced and forgotten, like colleagues or classmates—swallowing has never been…

Catbirds clawing at the ruby drupes of viburnum, and bouncing the boughs as the great heat squats over us and crickets sandpaper sunlight in the bristling meadow. We are not lost. We're just quiet. If we don't speak, it's not that we have nothing to say. But that the owl has said it for us in his raspy whistle, perched twenty feet away on a log fallen over the brook, professorial, examining the trickle amid stones. Then suddenly he drops and seizes—what? a salamander? in his beak. And gulps it down. A smacking, cracking sound, after which he fastidiously wipes his mouth on the trunk. Still more ingenious, the wasp who drills the oak leaf to lay her eggs, injecting poisons that swell the leaf into a gall, a globed…

I WANTED TO return to Montréal. Photograph the impractical spiral staircases clinging to narrow brick houses. Dance around drifts of cottonwood fluff, order coffee in French so terrible that the barista responds in English. I wasn't going to Montréal. I was packing from the hospital-provided list, ignoring all recommendations except the button-down shirts. That's a solid tip, because once the electrodes are attached, you cannot pull a shirt over your head. Instead of the suggested jigsaw puzzle, I packed two books for each day I'd be hospitalized. Cramming ten books into an overnight bag takes effort. I thought about Colin Craven in The Secret Garden, traveling the world via books while on miserable bedrest. As a child I had loved that book, but when it was given to my own kids, I'd…

When I was fifteen, I took up Hardy's Jude the Obscure—a mismatch. But there were these two sentences, page 34, I remember, of the Signet Classic paperback edition: Somebody might have come along that way… to tell him that his ideas were more advanced than those of grammarian. But nobody did come because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error, Jude continued to wish himself out of the world. And I typed that out and folded the paper very small and put it in my wallet. I carried it like it was my identity card, always on my person, my license to breathe. It was that hook before the semicolon, its perfect music but nobody did come because nobody does— that was the parting of the Red Sea, the…

The Threepenny Review is supported by Hunter College, the Bernard Osher Foundation, Campizondo Foundation, Mad Rose Foundation, the George Lichter Family Fund, and the CLMP/Mellon Foundation’s Literary Arts Emergency Fund. Our writer payments are underwritten by our Writers’ Circle, which includes Robert Bauer, Richard V. Clayton, Susan Knapp, Richard Murphy, Eunice & Jay Panetta, Robert Redford, Neal Rosenthal & Kerry Madigan, Nancy Rudolph, and Pablo Woodward. Additional individual donors are listed annually in our Spring issue. Our heartfelt thanks to all!…