Fall 2020

The Threepenny Review

One of most original literary magazines on the entire planet

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Contributors
Wendell Berry is a novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, and farmer. His recent books include The Art of Loading Brush, The Peace of Wild Things, and Stand by Me. Amber Caron’s work has appeared in Southwest Review, PEN America Best Debu
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The Threepenny Review
Editor and Publisher: Wendy Lesser Associate Editors: Sabrina Ramos Rose Whitmore Art Advisors: Allie Haeusslein Sandra Phillips Proofreader: John Branch Consulting Editors: Geoff Dyer Deborah Eisenberg Jonathan Franzen Louise Glück Janet Malcolm
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Table Talk
YOU CAN’T work in the Financial District without thinking about death, at least some of the time. For instance, each morning, walking up the subway steps at Fulton Street, the first thing I see is One World Trade Center looming above the neighborhood
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The Way With Porcupines
Mama Coyote parks her pups on a rock ledge to watch her entertain the porcupine pretending to ignore her, absent-minded, secure in his invincible defense. Advancing three deliberate short steps, she stares him down. One step closer and he’s chitterin
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Thanks to Our Donors
The Threepenny Review is supported by Hunter College, the Bernard Osher Foundation, the Campizondo Foundation, and the George Lichter Family Fund. Our writer payments are underwritten by our Writers’ Circle, which includes Robert Bauer, Richard V. Cl
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A Note On The Artworks
Although there are certain conventions for the genre of urban or street photography, the images taken by the self-taught Scottish photographer Will Collier manage to sidestep them. His photographs are not dense with people, despite their location wit
The Threepenny Review15 min read
The Great Unknowing
...woman is her body as man is his, but her body is something other than her. —Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex THAT SPRING I walked into the hospital for a minor procedure and walked out with a handful of balloons into the strangest six weeks of
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The Wind Has Died
My little boat, Take care, There is no Land in sight. —Charles Simic ■
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On Certainty and On Doubt
On Certainty by Ludwig Wittgenstein, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (German-English edition). Harper Perennial, 1972, $14.99 paper. WITTGENSTEIN NEVER again held the reins as tightly as he did in his first work, the Tractatus, publ
The Threepenny Review1 min read
Dark Morning
Is it dark morning? my children ask in the pre-dawns of winter. This time, I don’t know the answer. I hope so, my loves, I damn sure hope this sightless cold is the broad back of daylight turning around to hold us. ■
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Opening the Field
I FIRST ENCOUNTERED Robert Duncan’s poetry when I was in my early twenties, and I had no idea what to make of it. I knew Duncan was connected to multiple twentieth-century avant-garde poetic movements and practices. I knew he had spent most of his li
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House of Mystery/Oregon Vortex
The whole world’s gone out of true, it seems, nothing plumb or square, everywhere the spirit level wavers. The eye lies, and the lay of the land betrays, the house falls up the hill. Admittedly, all this glitter may be fool’s gold, but if we were not
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Strange Coast
IT WAS not until my bus pulled into view of the sea somewhere past Sandgate that I realized how long it had been since I’d seen the ocean. After so many years, the sight still gave me a homeward pull in my heart, though this stretch of coast was stra
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Tarantula
I spot it marching across the lawn, an ensemble of armatures, darkly articulated. From my lofty view on the stoop, its slow flurry could be a combine on the plains, harvesting—Isn’t “harvestman” a name given to its distant cousin, daddy longlegs? Loo
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Our Local Dead
IT SEEMS somehow very timely, so close to All Souls’ Day, the chance discovery of an ossuary in Calle de Arapiles in Madrid, near to where I still live—an ossuary that originally contained no fewer than three hundred corpses. Apparently, these mortal
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Obituary
The only page that’s always all about life, Latin for “gone down.” Pues, cooler than “grief.” The other pages of News are all about death. Nu, what went down? What’s up? Or underneath? In Spanish and Yiddish, a word the sound of waiting For what may
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A Symposium on Anxiety
I’LL BE frank: I don’t understand quantum mechanics at all. Or much of anything else, either, when it comes right down to it, and it makes me extremely uneasy to know that here I am walking around at a total loss, yet apparently there’s an explanatio
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The Stonemason’s Wife
JOLINA HAS been hearing voices of men she’s never met. Voices like water, clear and cold, eddying at the back of her mind. They’re not real. She knows this. As in, she’s not crazy. They’re only the voices she’s heard on the phone, voices of men who b
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Listening to Handel
LIKE EVERYONE else, I have not heard a live opera for a number of months. By chance, the very last opera I saw in person—in February, at the Metropolitan Opera House—was Handel’s Agrippina. Starring the brilliant Joyce DiDonato as the eponymous empre
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Class
I remember one evening in the 1970s my father saying They should write on my tombstone: “He didn’t like To be leaned on.” He was a dab hand at epitaphs. His for himself was: “He was quite good, but not quite good enough.” (And even this Was denied hi
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Drottningholm
A photograph from years ago—my parents in front of Drottningholm Palace near Stockholm. It’s probably September, month of partings and rapture. My father in his tie, my mother’s scarf (elegance pre-1968). They watch me closely, fondly, with concern.
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The Choreographer Speaks
Jerome Robbins, by Himself, edited by Amanda Vaill. Knopf, 2019, $40.00 cloth. AMANDA VAILL has written on other subjects, but for more than fifteen years she has circled back, again and again, to the choreographer and director Jerome Robbins. In 20
The Threepenny Review12 min read
The Master
OF THE GREAT living world filmmakers, Marco Bellocchio may be the least recognizable name, at least outside his native Italy, though he has been working for nearly six decades and has released twenty-seven fiction features, five documentaries, sixtee
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My Mother as Tom Cruise
Or as every other late 80s action hero my mother succesfully jumping off of a skyscraper onto another skyscraper my mother hunting the Predator with a cigar lodged in her mouth my mother saying sonofabitch in the coolest way imaginable my mother ripp
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Rachel Cusk, Euro-English, and Me
I RECENTLY listened to a London Review of Books podcast with British novelist Rachel Cusk in which she discussed her Outline trilogy of novels (Outline, Transit, Kudos). Towards the end of the recording, she talked about the sort of English she puts
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One of Us
GROVER GIBBS in his day and strength was no doubt the head philosopher-king of Port William. His only competitor for that “position,” as Mr. Milo Settle called it, would have been Burley Coulter. But during Burley’s often absences, for reasons known
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Pork Chop Hill
The past bullies the present, besets it at the doors of this condo worksite: my father walks out, it’s 1959, and with him blown plaster meal aches my nostrils with smells of sheetrock, turps, wallpaper paste, revenant miasmas and sun-broken shapes in

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