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

We are grateful to the following individuals, who in 2023 generously contributed to The Threepenny Review, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Friends of The Threepenny Review gave up to $99 each, those in The Silver Bells donated between $100 and $49

This spring your whole inner life is Little Richard.You surrender to his octave-jumping high notes as he shakes out the fringes of his glittering coat. His boots glitter, too. How narrow, those feet. And those wigs! How full. “Is that your hair?” he'

Where is my dear sixteen-year-old cat I wish to carry upstairs in my arms looking up at me and thinking be careful, dear human Sixteen years. How many days since I found you as if an urchin in a snowstorm and you moved in assured learned the territor

How quickly one gets from A to Z, how swiftly one says everything there is to see: these bars, for instance, and the flexible fencing of sharks, and how impossibly far it is—this life from that. ■

In D'Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, Zeus was always marrying different nymphs, that's what it said, married, no mention of abduct or rape or even forcible kiss. I wanted to marry Zeus. Also cow-stealing Hermes, also Theseus who refused the brigand on

SHE WAS dying, that was the first thing. The first thing was that she was dying. She was thirty-four, and it was the sunset of her life, though both of them still had the teenager's belief that death would pass them by. In the hospital, she said to h

Front Cover: Baben, 2019. 3: Welter Sky 1 2018. 4: The Weight, 2015. 6: Impasse at Sodom's Creek, 2017. 8: The Medium, 2017. 12: Frankie, 2022. 13: Flora, 2n023. 14: The Fight, 2019. 16: Knoxville Girl, 2016. 17: Delia, 2017. 18: Nell, 2017. 20: Rosi

Kristine Potter cites two inspirations for her project Dark Waters, from which the images in this issue are taken. The first are her memories of growing up in Georgia, near a place called Murder Creek. Traveling across the eight southern states as an

Before I was born, I was conceived. Some used to say that girl sperm had short tails, and thick skin, so they got there slowly, and could hang around hours or days as the golden majesty of the egg moved down out of the blister-door of the ovary. But

have a whispery urgency, words slanted forward as if hurried by breezes in a dream or a thought or a poem copied out by Petrarch, his compact hand imitated in type by Manutius in 1501, chiseled upright Roman letters softened, sloped, lightened, text'

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

Enrique Vila-Matas ON ONCE again re-reading the penultimate fragment of Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten—the part where Herr Benjamenta and the narrator go off traveling together, dreaming of absolute freedom—I sense a possible family resemblance wit

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

One third of this poem is a lie; I'll let you decide which. I missed the irises this year. They bloom for a breath of May, their purple lips parted like suns. I had my excuses: so much to do, so much reaching. Gathering stems in a shattered vase. My

The ex-circus strongman shared his armed-robbery cell with a philologist, a tattoo artist Latinist who inked lines and pictures out of Ovid. His Artemis sleeved down one over-muscled arm; down the other, terrified Philomel trilled from the tree Daphn

In my dream, someone mentioned“Kenneth Koch's great poem ‘Amnesia.’”“I don't remember that one,” I said,but suddenly, as though projected on the air,I could see the first few lines. I decided to go home and findthe rest of the poem but couldn't remem