Fall 2021

The Threepenny Review

One of most original literary magazines on the entire planet

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The Threepenny Review
Wendy Lesser Sabrina Ramos Rose Whitmore Allie Haeusslein Sandra Phillips Zachary Greenwald Geoff Dyer Deborah Eisenberg Jonathan Franzen Louise Glück Ian McEwan Robert Pinsky Kay Ryan Tobias Wolff ■
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Contributors
Allison Adair is the author of Clearing, winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. Originally from central Pennsylvania, she now lives and works in Boston. Bruce Benway is a creative director in New York who has taught writing and edited a shipboard new
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Table Talk
UNSKILLED LABORER is the technical name for the job that I do. You don’t hear often of other positions being specifically unskilled, like unskilled chefs, or unskilled doctors. Regardless, the modifier is as upfront and honest as you can get, and I c
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Reader,
Blunders, errancy, avarice and horseshitOccupy my mind while training my body.And shall I feed Cousin RemorseAs beggars feed amiable vermin? Here’s fake penance for my sins.I’m paid handsomely for my confessions,And choose, giddy always, the swamp.Cr
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Thanks to Our Donors
The Threepenny Review is supported by Hunter College, the Bernard Osher Foundation, Campizondo Foundation, CLMP, Mad Rose Foundation, and the George Lichter Family Fund. Our writer payments are underwritten by our Writers’ Circle, which includes Robe
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A Note On The Artworks
In 1980, the twenty-four-year-old British photographer Tish Murtha wrote an article about the Thatcher government’s disinvestment in the young people of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. “No established channels exist to represent or even acknowledge the interest
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Devotional
IN THE nursery, my husband reads a poem from the perspective of a dog. The poem is in Saint Judas, James Wright’s second book. Wright disavowed this book, which is unfathomable to my husband—he has been reading this book, and it is remarkable, he bel
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Quoting the Bible
Tonight I’m thinking about Jesuswhich isn’t remarkablefor most people on Christmasbut it is for me.Which means that I’m reallythinking about the lightfrom Seamus Heaney’s phonewhen he texted his wifedon’t be afraid seconds beforehe left his body behi
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The Death of Tyler Clementi
ON THE weekend that eighteen-year-old Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge, I tucked my infant son into his carrier and took the train to my childhood home in New Jersey. My mother wanted to see me. She wanted to talk about the dea
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Negative
Of course it’s not.Were you angry, wereyou sad? Are youa disgruntled former employeeof the earth? Youhave company. I knowsome walks can getyou nowhere. I’ve seenone child take awaya toy from anothernot because they wantedthe lamb or trainor drum, but
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Livingston Press
Recent & forthcoming fiction https://livingstonpress.uwa.edu William Gay’s last posthumous novel! “Gay is telling us . . . there have to be the stories. Otherwise, the emptiness is too much to endure.” —Frye Gailiard hardcover $28.95, 240 pages
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Snake Handler
At lastI understand what I wasafraid of— looking downat my two hands,having nothing else to beafraid of. ■
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Donating My Body to a Figure Drawing Class
Cross my legsif you need togaze unaroused. I thought that is whyI was here. Make me thickand animal.Veins on my armselicited from page. Unblush this face.Take my smile as penance. I could wear a collared shirtor prude me into a tie. Dislocate what yo
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Mental Music
IN 2001, David Edmonds and John Eidinow published the remarkable Wittgenstein’s Poker, subtitled The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers. It was an exemplary exercise in how to write a hugely entertaining book about a chapte
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Portrait Of The Artist
THE SAME year Robert Walser checked himself into a mental institution, his writing career long since behind him, Walter Benjamin, then an unknown writer, published an essay on the German-speaking Swiss author that begins “We can read much by Robert W
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A Symposium on Childhood
THROUGH MY early years of grade school, my mother kept us afloat by working in a Dairy Queen, farming me out to even needier families on weekends and summer days. One of those families had an old fishing boat propped up in their front yard. What was
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Photo Credits
All of the photographs in this issue were taken by Tish Murtha and are copyrighted in the name of her daughter, Ella Murtha, with all rights reserved. Below are the captions for each image, listed by page. Front Cover: Statues, Beechgrove Road, from
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5 O’Clockface
When I open my eyes, there’s the eastern innerborder of my home state,the hands greenish with creamy granularphosphorescence, and the hinge of the anglethe lake of my childhood: purple underthunderheads; chartreuse; silver;in sunlight the fierce turq
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Child Actors
IN ROBERT Altman’s 1974 movie Thieves Like Us, three escaped convicts hole up for a few days with Mattie (Louise Fletcher), the sister-in-law of one of them, and we get a glimpse of what life is like in the depths of the Depression for a struggling w
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Feeding the Hungry, 1986
She conjured loaves for us from cupboard dust,Ensorcelled our breakfast from iotasOf this and bits of that, whatever sheFound stuck to the far sticks of the pantry.Twenty-six, three kids, she could sauteé motesInto morsels like a Clark CountyChristA
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Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained (1994)
WHEN MY father was the age I am now, I was four going on five, and we had just returned from America after a year in New Haven, Connecticut. My first really clear memories date from then, so much so that, for a while, I saw my father as a typical 195
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Retiring
Elk bones everywhere myfather texts, from a gulchoutside Eagle, Colorado.At seventy, he’s begun to hunt more decisive danger: the riftunjumpable, the trail belowa cocked boulder, orcopperheads fizzing in slim fissures. No more meat, he insists.Turn
The Threepenny Review46 min read
A Time And Times And The Dividing Of Time
IN THE AFTERNOON of a gray Friday in February 1944, Andy Catlett rode the school bus from the Hargrave School to its place of turning around on the Birds Branch Road near Port William. From there it was a walk of half a mile or so to the house of his
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The Stowaway
IN MY family, no one went to sea. We were not seagoing kind of people. The idea of sailing across an ocean or around the world was as foreign to us as taking a rocket to the moon. So, it was something of a surprise when I took a job on a cruise ship

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