Spring 2020

The Threepenny Review

One of most original literary magazines on the entire planet

The Threepenny Review3 min read
Contributors
Tariq al Haydar’s stories and essays have appeared in Diagram, North American Review, The Offing, and elsewhere. Christopher Buckley’s recent books are Star Journal: Selected Poems, Cloud Memoir: Selected Longer Poems, and Agnostic. Adam Chiles gre
The Threepenny Review14 min read
Table Talk
JUDY GARLAND started it. I wasn’t at her Carnegie Hall performance in April of 1961, but in my sixteenth year I’d somehow come into possession of the double LP live recording of it. I didn’t so much listen to the performance as I was pierced by it an
The Threepenny Review2 min read
A Note From The Artist
I drew from a very young age, at first copying illustrations from my picture books or cartoons, but quickly moving on to everything around me: objects in the house, the view through the window, my family. I was talented but narrow in my influences, w
The Threepenny Review10 min read
Making Peace
TWO OF my aunts lived in the same senior citizens’ home. The older one, “Big Aunt,” ninety-nine, had been bedridden for years. The other, Aunt Nobuko, eighty-five, had a terminal illness. When my mother told me she had visited her sisters-in-law beca
The Threepenny Review6 min read
Unreal Cities
No Matter by Jana Prikryl. Tim Duggan Books/Penguin Random House, 2019, $15.00 paper. IN The After Party (2015), the poet Jana Prikryl threw a celebration for the end of the world—or at least her world. She delighted in this imagined end’s combinati
The Threepenny Review9 min read
A Taxonomy of Longing
Message from the Shadows by Antonio Tabucchi. Archipelago Books, 2019, $18.00 paper. THE ITALIAN writer Antonio Tabucchi’s oeuvre is notably eclectic, and has about it the air of a painful exertion. Each story is so strange he seems to be reinventin
The Threepenny Review14 min read
The Care-Giver
THE SICKNESS arrived in the spring. A rash and a sense of imbalance: her feet, she complained, felt heavy, as though she could not lift them from the ground. The falls began later that summer: minor trips around the house, then a big one while walkin
The Threepenny Review23 min read
A Symposium on Hands and Feet
DON’T LOOK here for science, as it’s not what I do. (I’m a choregrapher.) However, I do have quite a long and deep familiarity with the human body, and I’ve grown particularly fond of the manual and pedal extremities. I can’t defend the natural selec
The Threepenny Review1 min read
The Metro at Père Lachaise
tal vez un jueves, come es hoy, de otoño —César Vallejo I step out thinking of Vallejoin that photo, thinas a storm-blown branch,in his black coat leaningagainst a white boulder,hat in hand, looking into the earth,alone with the sky, asking…Christ,
The Threepenny Review6 min read
Our Faces
MUCH AS digital watches don’t allow us to imagine or visualize the passing of time—symbolized on analog watches by their moving hands and spherical shape—people’s faces no longer change as they used to, slowly and in one direction only (forward), but
The Threepenny Review14 min read
Portrait Of A Production
ON AN April afternoon in 1956, the whole company of The Iceman Cometh at the Circle in the Square—twenty-two people in all—were sitting in a tight circle in José Quintero’s office above the stage, engaged in our first rehearsal. We had read through t
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Vegas Neon
Motel Vegas by Fred Sigman. Smallworks Press, 2019, $29.99 cloth. IT’S TO be expected. You take photographs in order to document things—Paris in the case of Eugène Atget in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the shacks of the America
The Threepenny Review11 min read
Alternate History
Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, 2019. IT TAKES the entire running time of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood to figure out what Quentin Tarantino is up to in it, partly because it unfolds at a leisurely pace that
The Threepenny Review15 min read
Dionysian Ecstasy
The Bassarids, an opera by Hans Werner Henze, with a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. Komische Oper, Berlin, October 2019. THE KOMISCHE Oper was one of two major opera houses in the old East Berlin, and in comparison to the stately Staat
The Threepenny Review10 min read
Ponderation
THE WORLD slides away in great chunks. Literally, the ground beneath your feet—gone. There are four sinkholes in and around Wink, Texas, the most famous being the Wink Sink. No one knows how deep it goes, but in 2002, a lone diver tried to figure it
The Threepenny Review3 min read
Thanks to Our Donors
We are grateful to the following individuals, who in 2019 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

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