June 16, 2026 A Letter from the Editor Announcing Our Summer Issue By Emily Stokes As we were working on our new Summer issue, my partner and I began fostering a rescue dog, a seven-month-old pit bull named Woody. Left to his own devices on a sidewalk, Woody has the manner of someone searching for a lost earring. Often, having found the thing he was apparently looking for, he refuses to budge. It was only after we had spent a couple of weeks dragging him down our street that a friend advised that, without being given time to sniff at things, he was exhausting his body but not his mind, which was why he was often as antic after a walk as he was before. “Smelling is like reading for them,” the friend said. I grew up being told that reading makes you a more empathetic, nicer person; more recently, I’ve heard that “deep reading” (which means, essentially, reading a book) is the best way to reclaim your atrophying attention span. For some, who might prefer to outsource the activity and receive a quick description of what it was like, it’s an anachronism. Headlines say that children are spending less of their spare time with books—in Britain, the problem is a “relentless” focus on literacy, which sounds particularly Roald Dahl. What all these conversations are missing, of course, is the fact that reading is one of the most mysterious, pleasurable pastimes we have—which is why we have put together a Summer issue that we believe will fill you with a strange feeling of yearning, like a dog at a tree stump who would like to stay longer than is feasible. So it was after my colleague Dennis passed me Shuang Xuetao’s “God’s Arrow,” which appears in print for the first time in our pages, in a translation by Jeremy Tiang, and is named after a weapon with magical powers. “If it flies through the air,” says an enigmatic benefactor of the kind we could all use, “hold in your mind what you want to happen, and it will come true.” Read More
June 16, 2026 On Sports The Ultimate Fighting Championship Goes to Washington By Stephanie Cuepo Wobby Photograph by G. Edward Johnson, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. In an apt omen of things to come, the first prefight press conference for UFC Freedom 250 opened with an AI-generated promotional video and ended with an unplanned altercation. It was early May; the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s “D.C. Takeover”—the culmination of Donald Trump’s promise to bring the UFC to the White House—was still more than a month away. But UFC President Dana White convened the event’s stars for a quick Q&A in Newark, New Jersey. Most of the fighters came dressed in suits, button-downs, or athleisure, but heavyweight Josh “the Incredible Hok” Hokit arrived wearing a long black cloak, an American-flag-themed skullcap, and matching gloves—candy cane stripes trailing down every finger, a solid blue block across his knuckles, an eagle glaring out from the back of each hand. Hokit, a former NFL player who transitioned to MMA because he “wanted to do a real man’s sport,” has a penchant for answering journalists’ questions in rhymes. This presser was no exception. He aimed his insults at Brazilian fighter Alex “Poatan” Pereira, in an attempt to goad him (and White) into setting up an official bout, now that the former middleweight champion had moved up to Hokit’s weight class. (“Alex gained some weight and now he thinks he’s King Kong / but his girl said the steroids killed his ding dong.”) When a reporter asked Hokit about going face-to-face with Pereira, he escalated: I come to devour. You will know the day, you will know the hour. I’m gonna give Pereira a golden shower! Read More
June 12, 2026 Diaries A Diary from the Psychic Capital of the World By Greta Rainbow Cassadaga front office. Photograph by Greta Rainbow. Friday, March 27, 2026 When I waded into the Florida humidity, Mom and Mimi were waiting for me at curbside pickup, three hours after the worst airport security I’d ever experienced. The TSA line at JFK had snaked around the sidewalk. I’d cut shamelessly. I hugged my mother first, then her mother. I’d last seen Mimi at Uncle Dan’s funeral almost two years before, and I hadn’t been down to Florida in ten. I used to spend every spring break in New Smyrna Beach, poking lizards and watching late-night TV in a room covered in glow-in-the-dark stars. I liked to watch my mother be mothered by a grandma who would never let us call her that. Mimi asked what I wanted to do now, by which she meant, did we mind stopping at an antique mall nearby. This was my childhood, Mom said. Mimi had been a Boston antiques dealer, a detail covered in Mom’s memoir in progress, which I’ve read and Mimi hasn’t. The book is about being raised by hippies, and how you can feel loved without feeling safe. I’d conceived of my role that weekend as moral support in general, and specifically in the project of locating lost paperwork involving dead men. Such items included a trove of love letters sent to Mimi in the early sixties, which Mom wanted for book research, and stock certificates belonging to Dan, who, despite practicing as a Manhattan lawyer, did not have a will—thus rendering Mimi, his sister, the executor of the estate. She’d come into the role after Dan was murdered on a spring afternoon, while walking on a bike path outside of Albany. We still don’t have answers. In the fall, a twenty-five-year-old man was charged with one count of second-degree murder—seemingly not premeditated, a random act of insane violence against a practicing Buddhist. That was also the reason for the one activity I’d added to the itinerary. Sometime in the past decade, someone told me that there is a Psychic Capital of the World. The Psychic Capital of the World happens to be an unincorporated community in central Florida called Cassadaga, and is twenty-three miles from Mimi’s house. She’d been there before, by virtue of living nearby and being the kind of person who would go to a Psychic Capital of the World, which is one of the ways that we are alike. Read More
June 11, 2026 On Poetry What Is Poetry? Chelsey Minnis’s Frying Pan Full of Diamonds By Jordan Castro Seth Lemmons, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. Early on in Opera Fever, her newest collection of poetry, Chelsey Minnis asks: “Is this a poem or the back of a shovel?”—something that can literally take off the back of your head. This January, I read a dozen or so noir novels from the thirties and forties. People were smothered with towels, bludgeoned in bathtubs, beaten to death with glass decanters, and killed by stray bullets at dance marathons. Some weeks, I watched a noir film every night. I watched YouTube videos about noir. Noir, one video explained, was a reaction to the Depression and the war: it gave form to a cynical vision of American life, depicting an amoral and violent world that many had come to think of as the dark reality underlying ordinary experience. The darkness feels revelatory and “real,” yet this effect was achieved through surreal German Expressionist-influenced artifice. Noir is highly stylized—chiaroscuro lighting, rain-slicked streets, hard-boiled speech—and yet it is one of the twentieth century’s great visual languages for representing “reality.” When I first became interested in literature at fourteen, I was obsessed with realism in the form of “authenticity.” Writing, I thought, was self-expression. The more “honest” it was—and the more devoid of “unnecessary” flourish—the better. I liked Kmart realism and so-called alt-lit, in which authors expressed their bleak worldviews simply, in a seemingly unmediated manner. I listened to rap music, where being “real” was the archvirtue. But the older I got, the more “realness” as an aesthetic value felt pale and inadequate, if not deluded and impossible. Art that had once seemed to me, naively, to express real life, increasingly felt like an elaborate construction that used “authenticity” as a kind of crutch. Every so-called realism implicitly made claims about what counted as real, and what didn’t. But more obviously artificial modes know what noir’s aestheticized “realism” inadvertently shows: that the world isn’t simply there, but stylized into visibility. Read More
June 9, 2026 On Books The Vanishing Library: Timothy Ely’s Odd Little Book from Outer Space By Max Ross Borderline by Timothy Ely, front (left) and back (right) cover. Photographs by Max Ross. Late in the week I got an email from one of my book dealers. He was at a fair in New York and thought he’d found a buyer for Timothy Ely’s Borderline, a unique artist’s book I’d placed with him on consignment. It was welcome news; we’d been trying to sell Borderline for two years. Before traveling to New York, he’d asked if we might lower the price, from ten thousand dollars to seven thousand and five hundred, and I’d agreed that it seemed like time. Nothing was finalized, my dealer said, but he was optimistic. The prospective buyer had asked to be looped in if anyone else made an offer, and also wanted to know more about the book’s provenance. In my reply I explained how it had come into my possession: My father, a lawyer and book collector, had done some legal work for the founder of Granary Books, a publisher specializing in artists’ editions. As payment, he was able to buy titles from Granary at cost. He’d acquired a dozen or so through this arrangement, and Borderline was one of them. I’d inherited it when he’d died, about four years earlier. I didn’t want to sell Borderline, exactly. Like all the books I’d inherited, it was a little holy to me. To let it go would be to let go of another part of my father. I didn’t want to let more of him go. I’d begun to feel I was erasing him, forsaking him. He’d built his collection over four decades: a few hundred titles—first editions, special editions, illustrated editions—that, taken together, expressed him as vividly as a self-portrait. I knew who my father was because I’d worked to understand his tastes. His shelves held Joyce, Borges, Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery; invention, philosophy, sensitivity, sensuality, beauty. (He’d joked once, after coming out, that he’d never been in the closet but between book covers.) Read More
June 8, 2026 On Translation The Summer of Lion Meat By Tere Dávila and Rebecca Hanssens-Reed Robinet Testard, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. Translator’s Note: This piece uses the medieval-period translation technique of inserting metacommentary directly into the text when a detail is dubious or has no verifiably accurate translation. The technique is used here to highlight, play with, and contribute to Dávila’s own footnotes regarding unreliable facts within the autofictional narrative. This version adds another layer to the communally constructed story, first published in Spanish in 2019. That was the summer I had to choose, in a matter of seconds, how I wanted to die; I recommend avoiding as best you can the sort of ill-advised predicament I found myself in thanks to a heat wave that had descended on Boston. I’d just finished my third year of college and had decided to finally take the programming course I’d put off all those semesters, but instead of staying in a dorm, where I’d have to cram into a tiny room with a complete stranger, I joined three classmates who were looking for a fourth person to split the rent for a house. The pluses: I’d have my own room, and, though I didn’t know my new housemates well, I’d chatted a handful of times with one of them, Tom,1 who was not only friendly but also pretty cute. The minus: the house wasn’t in Cambridge, where the campus is, but in Somerville, a nearby neighborhood that had fallen into decline and was, therefore, where my roommates could afford to live. I no longer remember why I was so hell-bent on sticking to this meager budget—my parents would have helped me out if I’d wanted to find a nicer place—but I suppose I wanted to assert my independence by making my own decisions, even if they were stupid. My room in the attic seemed romantic at first, with a gable roof and a large picture window that let in lots of light, but by sundown I understood why no one else had claimed it (I was last to join the group). As the highest point in the house—like most old buildings in the Northeast, it was built for the cold, thus offering neither the perks of air conditioning nor a ceiling fan—that was where the heat accumulated from each protracted summer day. I quickly realized it was best to go up there only to sleep (or to attempt an uneasy approximation of sleep) and so I spent most afternoons languishing on the first floor, reading with a sheet thrown over the faux-leather sofa so my skin wouldn’t stick. But sometimes even this was unbearable. Then any excuse to escape the house was a good one—return a library book, make photocopies at Kinko’s,2 or, in one instance, go on an excursion that would take a very strange turn. I went out in search of a grocery store to satisfy a craving for cold, green, crisp grapes. “There’s a Foodmaster3 ten minutes from here,” Tom said, without offering to join. I wanted him to come with me. During that pre-GPS summer, in the prehistoric era before cell phones, if I made it anywhere based on the directions someone explained to me it was an act of God. My destination this time was somewhere within the uncharted territory of Somerville. I should have asked, but I didn’t dare. Twenty minutes later I had no idea where I was. Tom’s directions were shitty. I was nowhere near a supermarket and couldn’t even find anyone to ask for help. Houses were boarded up, the front yards overgrown; a sullen quiet occupied what had once been a neighborhood full of families dreaming of upward mobility, most of them workers for Ford Motor Company, who had left when the factories did. The houses had been split into apartments for cheap, short-term rentals, for people who didn’t have an interest in—rather, who didn’t have the means of—maintaining them. We could say they were transitory people, or people forced into transitory circumstances. I was delirious from the heat. Night was falling, but not the temperature. I was weighing whether to abort Misión Uvas (Mission Grape) and turn back when I saw a store that was open, not my Foodmaster but a small butcher shop. The sign read SAVENOR’S MEATS. Read More