Fall 2017

The Threepenny Review

One of most original literary magazines on the entire planet

The Threepenny Review9 min read
Table Talk
ALIENS WHO are detained by the government in the New York metropolitan area are usually held on the outskirts of Elizabeth, New Jersey—about seven miles, as the crow flies, from the Statue of Liberty. The buildings that serve this purpose are the Ess
The Threepenny Review3 min read
Contributors
Elise Arnold-Levene is an assistant professor of Spanish at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, New York. She specializes in modern Cuban literature. Wendell Berry lives and works on a farm in Port Royal, Kentucky. Among other things, he is a poet, fiction
The Threepenny Review9 min read
Revision and Revenge
ONCE, I TRIED to live the same day twice. My partner was traveling, and I had recently decided to quit my job, without immediate prospects. July in Berkeley: mild-mannered sun, not even the chance of a cloud. The foolishness of bemoaning such consist
The Threepenny Review2 min read
A Note On The Artworks
The story of Dorothea Lange’s career as a documentarian is almost as iconic as her best-known photographs. One day, early in the decade that saw the Great Depression sweep so many into poverty, Lange left the portrait studio she ran in San Francisco
The Threepenny Review7 min read
Remains
THIS IS what you think your mother’s remains will look like. The ash will be black, like all that soot in the fireplace. It will be heavy, like wet sand. There will not be too much of it. It will fit in a small urn with intricate designs on the borde
The Threepenny Review5 min read
Free as Aira
CÉSAR AIRA, a sixty-eight-year-old Argentine writer based in Buenos Aires, has not heretofore been a household name in North America. Yet Aira’s prose pours forth unstoppably—he’s approaching a hundred titles over the last three decades—and now Engli
The Threepenny Review25 min read
A Symposium on Neighborhoods
IN HARDY’S “The Self-Unseeing,” he visits the remains of his childhood home and recalls where the door was, how the floor felt, how his mother sat “staring into the fire” while her fiddler husband “bowed it higher and higher.” The last two bitterswee
The Threepenny Review10 min read
Alien Mark
WHEN I WAS young there were three things my grandmother loved to do: sunbathe, smoke her tobacco pipe, and tell me stories about the Red Planet. “Make me my pipe and I will tell you a story about the Red Planet,” she would say to me. “My eyes are beg
The Threepenny Review10 min read
Echoes of Havana
HAVANA MORNINGS seep into my bedroom. There are no glass panes on my windows and the poorly fitted wooden shutters allow the sounds of the city to permeate my half-sleep. The streets come to me, impatient. I am equally impatient with their intrusion.
The Threepenny Review2 min read
The Gun Closet
Built into the wall and lined with green felt,it was just wide enough to stand in. Breathing tastedlike a wound—the copper, lead, and steel,the faint sulfur smell of a black powder gun. I’d pick the lock when my father wasn’t around,the rows of stock
The Threepenny Review9 min read
A Brilliant Director
Carmen, composed by George Bizet, adapted and directed by Louisa Proske. Heartbeat Opera, New York, May 21–28, 2017. I WOULD NOT normally seek out a small-scale production of Carmen performed in the tiniest and deepest of Baruch College’s basement au
The Threepenny Review4 min read
A Century of John Ford (1995)
THIS YEAR sees the centenary of two births: that of the cinema and of John Ford. Twenty-two years after his death, Ford clearly stands out as the best movie director ever. His movies are so much more alive than those of his colleagues, being at once
The Threepenny Review13 min read
Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion : The Beginning of Cinematic Realism
THE GOLDEN age of French film began late in the silent era and ended when the Nazis marched into Paris in 1940. It included the exquisite farces and pioneering musicals of René Clair, the towering achievements of the modernist experimenter Abel Gance
The Threepenny Review9 min read
Reflections on The Green Table
Journeys and Reflections, performed by Ballet West, Salt Lake City, April 2017. LOOKING OUT from the plane over the Great Salt Lake, I see celadon shifting into mustard as the sun ricochets off the water’s shallow surface. Pastels bleed together, at
The Threepenny Review28 min read
The Art of Loading Brush
I. AT LAST full of the knowledge of the wonder it is to be a man walking upon the earth, Andy Catlett is past eighty now, still at work in the fashion of a one-handed old man on what still he often calls in his thoughts the Riley Harford place, the n

The Threepenny Review

More Issues From The Threepenny Review