Autumn 2024

The Threepenny Review

One of most original literary magazines on the entire planet

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
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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. Xavier Blackwell-Lipkind‘s writing appears i
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Table Talk
MY COUSIN and I were talking at the post office and got pretty soon in the course of nature onto the subject of forgetfulness, a subject that seems to me not to have been so prominent back in the old days, but I may have forgot. We exchanged some exa
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Conversations with Max
More to affirm again an ancient contract Than out of thirst, with your percussive tongue You lap a trickle of water in the bathroom sink I rinse for you when I'm done shaving. That's life: I have had more of it than your allotment. Man has invented d
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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
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A Note On The Artworks
In the period leading up to the 2016 presidential election, the Londonborn artist Caleb Stein spent his time photographing Poughkeepsie. The old industrial city bordered on the Vassar College campus, where he was studying art history, so it was a fam
The Threepenny Review11 min read
Chain of Memory
MY GRANDMOTHER bought me a French press for my birthday, in early October of 2022. To inaugurate my new toy, I went to buy some coffee beans and settled on a local seasonal variety, the Roasterie's “Autumn Harvest.” The coffee was good, and for a few
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I Thank the Sheep
They said for $99 I could go anywhere I wanted for a month on the Greyhound, so I did. South, then west. I wasn't broke, I had a job, I could get off the bus sometimes to sleep in a nice hotel. It was the anywhere I wanted part that got me, and the n
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The Noblest of Things
I TOLD MY wife today, while I straining the last of the four gallons of honey they left behind, that someday, maybe next spring, we should put more bees in those boxes down by the road. But they would not be the same bees I came to know over the last
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Photo Credits
Front Cover: Caleb Stein, Snake and Column in Hudson Valley, 2022. 3: Caleb Stein, Scrap Yard, 2017. 4: Andrea Orejarena and Caleb Stein, Horse and Stairway (from Long Time No See), 2020. 7: Andrea Orejarena and Caleb Stein, Khoi's Bedroom Drawings (
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The Seasons Come and
We found him down on the beach in his wingtips and khakis. It was only the second time in his life he had seen the ocean. Landlocked, pasture-bound farmer, he understood seasons, their slow roll over the land. He stood facing the water, hands calm at
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The Quiet Effacement of Light
The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Patty Crane. Copper Canyon Press, 2023, $40.00 cloth. IN A HOME near the water in Sweden, there is a party with dancing. It is cold, but the dancing has made the guests warm, so much
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Near Cairo
I remember the feeling everyone had traveled light years to be there, all these people holding the depths of who they were behind their faces as the boulevard entered a tunnel of sword palms and led to the river, where I watched a man carrying a clot
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As the Shore Comes to Meet Us
HARPER AND I were only two Red Hooks deep on a rented pontoon when I spied the heads bobbing dark against Lake Hartwell's shimmers. There hadn't been another boat all morning so I growled us over to the man and woman fighting to keep their faces abov
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Samson
He knows the news is a wheel he must turn or those who hate him will turn it to their own advantage and since the world is tuning in to watch the show his strong man act is what he will give them so he leans now against the first of the sacred pillar
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A Symposium on Escape
FOR A FEW years in my twenties—dull years without glamour, colorless, touched with real gloom—I drove around Los Angeles in a decrepit silver Chevy whose broken speedometer was permanently stuck on 100 mph. One day, motionless in traffic, this struck
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Each Month My Grandmother Sends Money to a Stranger Who Puts Flowers on Her Mother's Gravestone in Odesa
There are days I believe that nothing is sacred, that we will destroy ourselves as a form of hope and days when the dead birds in my driveway agree with me. As a child, I had hoped for something more than this. But tonight my daughter will let me roc
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All Laws in Limbo
THERE IS a policy. Maybe agreement is a better word. An understanding. One is hesitant to introduce words like policy when there is an opportunity to live outside the cage of bureaucracies. So let's go with understanding. The understanding is that a
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Sage And Smoke And Stones
SHE REACHED behind the chair she sat in, grabbing a bundle of dried white sage off of her windowsill, and placed it in an opalescent abalone shell in the middle of her coffee table. She flicked her lighter and held the yellow flame against the sage u
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Gown
for Dean Young When I was so deep in my trouble he sent me a jade skull I looked at it every day and felt its pale green laugh fill me and turn into a few words maybe the end of a hymn to the waitress who brought us fake absinthe that time in a gown
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Apostate Abecedarian
A sociology professor told my cousin Break a rule in a public setting. Cappuccino in hand, my cousin plopped down in the front pew of a Mormon chapel. Everyone turned when she slurped. Filthier than coffee, according to Mormon gospel, is immodesty— h
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A Classroom of One's Own
THE SUMMER after I graduated from college, I quit a short-lived, disastrous stint in sales and found a job as a teacher's assistant in a school for children with learning disabilities. Nestled in an unassuming cluster of cinderblock structures in Wes
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Tom Ripley, Shape Shifter
THE RECENT limited series Ripley is the latest attempt to get Patricia Highsmith's famous con man and killer Tom Ripley on the screen. There have been half a dozen (not counting a 1956 episode of Studio One) by an international collection of filmmake
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Doing CPR on Some Dude Who Looks Just Like My Father
And he has been dead so many years I barely recognize him But for him Into beating I could fake that heart a few more times Of compressions I'd breathe for him Press my lips into his Even though it is against protocol Ribs give under weight I fall th

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