Summer 2024

The Threepenny Review

One of most original literary magazines on the entire planet

The Threepenny Review3 min read
Contributors
Wendell Berry is a poet, fiction-writer, essayist, and environmental activist. Recent publications include The Art of Loading Brush, Stand by Me, and two volumes of essays in the Library of America series. T. J. Clark's next book is Those Passions: O
The Threepenny Review9 min read
Table Talk
LIKE FIFTY million other Americans, I have tinnitus. Not your ordinary, exasperating tinnitus where you hear a ringing in your ears, but a rare, exasperating form of tinnitus where you hear music—singing, not ringing. Oliver Sacks, in his book Musico
The Threepenny Review1 min read
Papier Mâché
He's ripping up a war. The strips of the New York Times slide between his fingers into the bowl of flour and glue chowder, then splotch around the balloon where he massages tanks, missiles, hollow-eyed helmeted men, and blasted apartments over the sw
The Threepenny Review1 min read
Photo Credits
All of the photographs in this issue are copyrighted by the Estate of Larry Fink and reproduced with the Estate's permission. Below are the captions for each image, listed by page. Please see page 8 for further information about Larry Fink. Front Cov
The Threepenny Review17 min read
Tapeworms
I. IN MY memory, we are awake in the pre-dawn dark, walking to where the earth dives down to kiss the pond. Loons and secretive deer watch us make our way to water that shimmers with the scrabbling of hundreds of thousands of mayflies, reminding us t
The Threepenny Review1 min read
The Threepenny Review
Editor and Publisher: Wendy Lesser Associate Editors: Evgeniya Dame Rose Whitmore Art Advisor: Allie Haeusslein Proofreader: Paula Brisco Consulting Editors: Geoff Dyer Deborah Eisenberg Jonathan Franzen Ian McEwan Robert Pinsky Kay Ryan Tobias Wolff
The Threepenny Review1 min read
Thanks to Our Donors
The Threepenny Review is supported by Hunter College, the Bernard Osher Foundation, Campizondo Foundation, Mad Rose Foundation, and the George Lichter Family Fund. Our writer payments are underwritten by our Writers' Circle, which includes Robert Bau
The Threepenny Review2 min read
A Note On The Artworks
Early in his career, Larry Fink bought a tuxedo to inveigle his way into Manhattan's debutante balls. Playing the part of a society photographer, he would move through the crowds, shooting in black and white with a handheld flash. Although Fink later
The Threepenny Review1 min read
The Garden of Ediacara
More fed than feeding, no need to hunt, track, seize, watch, hear, fend off or flee, unaware of anything, even themselves. Peaceable kingdom of still or slow moving blind grazers on the seafloor's bounty of bacterial mats; more bags of porousness tha
The Threepenny Review11 min read
Trash Heap Hero Likes How It's Going
NIT WORKS at the trash heap putting out fires. She didn't go to firefighter school, but ever since the landfill was relocated to her town twelve years ago, so many fires break out that they need her. She makes up for her lack of training with her ent
The Threepenny Review1 min read
On the Night of the Wolf Moon, My Mother Lands
at a small airport and can't find us which is a metaphor but also the truth. This is what the mind does: unloads its luggage onto a carousel that sounds more fun than it is, more like the way she used to be before—before before before we are always r
The Threepenny Review1 min read
You Shouldn't Be the One Carrying the Bags, Baby
One time at our Stop and Shop we saw our usual junkie saying mama can I get a quarter hey boss lady you got a dollar for me. I am mama, Josey's boss lady, duh. Since the pope said give without worry we keep singles in our center console, outside pock
The Threepenny Review4 min read
The Felon, the Hobo, and Their Child
“WHO'S THERE?” She side-eyed my long arms. Chickasaw sun circles, garfish with mouth open. An ivory-billed woodpecker's spreading wings fell out of the short sleeves of my uniform shirt, fading at each wrist. Peeking out my collar, the beak of it. My
The Threepenny Review12 min read
Floating Around
IT JUST so happened I was tired of being a physical creature. I wanted to get the upper hand before my body had a chance to inflict more damage upon me. To put it bluntly, three children were extinguished in my womb over the course of five years and
The Threepenny Review1 min read
After Fracture
I took my body for a walk. Nice and easy I said. Like coaxing something skittish from a stall. I went into the woods, found a brook. It sounded way better than the recorded version playing in waiting rooms everywhere. It had some things to say about
The Threepenny Review1 min read
Books Discussed In This Essay
Up Late by Nick Laird. W. W. Norton & Company, 2023, $26.95 cloth. The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx by Tara Bergin. Carcanet Press, 2013, $12.95 paper. Savage Tales by Tara Bergin. Carcanet Press, 2022, $17.11 paper. Stone Girl by Mary Noonan. Dedalu
The Threepenny Review5 min read
A Perfect Bradbury
A CHANCE DISCOVERY at midday. In the library, hidden behind Flaubert's novels, I find—dusty but intact, unseen for more than a quarter of a century—my much-missed, long-lost first issue of the fantasy and science-fiction magazine Minotauro, published
The Threepenny Review9 min read
Stretched Between Politics and Transcendence
IN 1984, when the paramilitary conflict in Northern Ireland between the Protestant Unionists and the Catholic IRA had already gone on for sixteen years and would run fourteen more, Seamus Heaney wrote an essay entitled “Place and Displacement: Recent
The Threepenny Review1 min read
The Eustace Diamonds
Named in honor of Anthony Trollope's witty and engaging Victorian novel, this select group consists of people who have generously donated at least $1000 per year to The Threepenny Review. Named after Henry James's great novel about the complicated re
The Threepenny Review8 min read
Outside
Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden by Camille T. Dungy. Simon and Schuster, 2023, $28.99 cloth. Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History by Camille T. Dungy. W.W. Norton, 2017, $25.95 cloth. Black Nature: Fo
The Threepenny Review4 min read
Even Considering
KIRAN BLEW a kiss to a rotund marmot loitering around the margins of a scenic turn-out. “Oh, Boo Boo,” she said. “You are a darling!” We were driving over the Beartooth Pass on our way to Yellowstone Park, a place that Kiran, a friend visiting for th
The Threepenny Review1 min read
A Little Poem
I put myself in mind of a stem of our native rye that followed a thread of the sun up through a pile of brush to break out into the world astir in full daylight and the darkness of full night. ■
The Threepenny Review7 min read
Beyond Asphalt
IN 1978 I decided to ride a tenspeed bike across the United States, alone, Virginia to Oregon. A college senior at the time, I'd had sixteen straight years of education since first grade, and they left me with a gnawing desire to get beyond the walls
The Threepenny Review2 min read
Enough
He was sitting by the open window when I climbed to the attic and I could see his breath—it was winter, thin snow streaking the roof—but he didn't hear me because his head and one arm were outside and the rest of him was inside, so I didn't say anyth
The Threepenny Review1 min read
What I Miss About a Dial Tone Is Possibility
Call me dazzled, dazzling, a hoof print in the dirt. Call me extinct or exacting or exactly what you needed. Call me what I am: guilty of nameless or whispered crimes. Call me on your way to Home Depot before or just after you've disposed of the body
The Threepenny Review4 min read
How Adam Met Eve Outside of a Bar in Queens
IN THE alley behind that Irish pub, Eve asked Adam for a light. Since they were not in Ireland, nor England, nor Europe, for that matter, Adam shrugged. He didn't smoke. Those who did carried e-cigarettes these days. Without words, he told her that h
The Threepenny Review5 min read
Peter Hujar's Backstage Portraits
Peter Hujar: Performance and Portraiture, at the Art Institute of Chicago, May 13, 2023–Oct 9, 2023. THEY FIT well here, shunted to the side, placed underground in the Art Institute's basement, next to the men's bathroom. Hujar did his best work in p
The Threepenny Review10 min read
Portrait Of A Marriage
Maestro, directed by Bradley Cooper, 2023. LEONARD BERNSTEIN pursued so many simultaneous careers that he's one twentieth-century American artist of whom it can be said without exaggeration that he contained multitudes. His break-through occurred whe
The Threepenny Review1 min read
Four Figures At A Table
What do you want of us? What have you got for us? What are you looking at? Oh, you mean pity again, poverty, austerity— That has a nice ring. Isn't my face Sufficiently set in its lineaments Of survival? Try to stop posing, you said. Give me the look
The Threepenny Review1 min read
The Mission in Grisaille
I can feel the future behind me and see the past in front of me like a sky-blue pyramid. What were you expecting to find after being isolated for so long? An underworld of people turned into screens turned into shadows; their anonymous faces like sym

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