Fall 2022

The Threepenny Review

One of most original literary magazines on the entire planet

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Contributors
J. A. Bernstein is the author of several works, including a novel, Rachel's Tomb. He teaches at the University of Southern Mississippi. Wendell Berry is a poet, fiction-writer, essayist, farmer, and environmental activist. His book of stories How It
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The Threepenny Review US
Editor and Publisher: Wendy Lesser Associate Editors: Sabrina Ramos Rose Whitmore Art Advisors: Allie Haeusslein Sandra Phillips Proofreader: Paula Brisco Consulting Editors: Geoff Dyer Deborah Eisenberg Jonathan Franzen Louise Glück Ian McEwan Rober
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Table Talk
IF YOU'VE driven north from San Francisco on Highway 101, through Marin County, a little way past the last Petaluma exit, then you've seen the house I grew up in. There's no reason for you to have noticed it. An unassuming, single-story, ranch-style
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Thanks to Our Donors
The Threepenny Review is supported by Hunter College, the Bernard Osher Foundation, Campizondo Foundation, Mad Rose Foundation, the George Lichter Family Fund, and the CLMP/Mellon Foundation's Literary Arts Emergency Fund. Our writer payments are und
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A Note On The Artworks
The discovery of Vivian Maier's artwork is one of the more astonishing revelations in the history of black-and-white photography. Born in New York City in 1926, Maier moved between France and the United States before settling in Chicago, where she sp
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Tingen
I was like the boy sitting on the bench and the bench remaining empty in his mind… unseen and unknown after fourteen months in residence, Niemand, der mich kennt, as Brother René remarked on his tombstone in the fool Eulenspiegel's village with four
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The Corridor Stories
MY NAME is Tetyana. I am from Kyiv, Ukraine. Two weeks ago, I escaped from the war and relocated to Dnipro, in central Ukraine, because it's safer here. I am writing these texts in a corridor of my brother's apartment. This is where my family and I a
The Threepenny Review1 min read
Fall of Varia
The tanks from the Past rolled in this morning.Our neighbors crowded the curbs to cheerthough only yesterday, they were snitching:A has prior tendencies, B has backward dreams… Already the old flag flies over the armory,the cathedral, the courthouse,
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Tender
I spend late morning weeping with the news: a black bear with burnt paws is euthanized along the latest wildfire's newest edge. It was crawling on its forearms, seeking a place to rest. I Google more; reports leak out: the bear had bedded down behind
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How It Felt
MILI PRAYED for death for the dog. One moment the creature, dazzled by the headlights, was in front of their four-by-four, the next he was flung on the side of the road, an addition to the dead in the roadside graveyards along the Miranshah–Boya road
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A Broad Perspective
The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion by Aminatta Forna. Grove Press, 2021, $26.00 cloth. LAST YEAR, when I looked for The Window Seat, Aminatta Forna's 2021 collection of essays, it wasn't available at my branch library. So instead I checked
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Other Books By Aminatta Forna Discussed Here
Happiness, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018, $16.00 paper. The Hired Man. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013, $15.00 paper. The Memory of Love, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011, $16.00 paper. Ancestor Stones, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006, $16.00 paper. The Devil T
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Pancake
I'M ON a locked psychiatric ward and I'm sitting in expressive therapy, which is a fancy name for arts and crafts with an occasional side of sobbing. Basically we sit at long tables like elementary school kids and draw or paint or write or sculpt, an
The Threepenny Review1 min read
I Just Need You to Know That Chickens Are Basically Dinosaurs
When you place the oval head of your pterodactyl nugget into your ketchup you walk a thin line of awareness that I as your parent do not fully understand. What meaning can we make of the dead? The answer is buried deep, recognizable only after we hav
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An Archaeological Inquest
I HAVE IN my possession a copy of an old Partisan Review, Winter 1960, Number 1, price $1.00, which was given to me by a student who knew of my interest in American postwar nonfiction. It is an astonishing object, like one of those time capsules buri
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Photo Credits
All of the photographs in this issue were taken by Vivian Maier and are copyrighted in the name of her estate, courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York. Below are the captions for each image, listed by page. Front Cover: Self
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The View from 1986
Burnt-out cars, stray horses, striding pylons,Grey-green grass. Beyond, blocky buildings rise.And further, distant cranes. Flickering eyes;Winter sunlight through trainside trees. NylonsOn a gatepost, trophy or clean-up crew.A loping greyhound, rope
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Eggplant, Magpie, Ice
ABOUT THREE years ago, when we were both trying to figure out if we could write, R. sent me a vignette he drafted in Seoul. Through his essay, titled “Eggplant,” I learned that R. could write. I also learned about “the opposite of Proustian,” a phras
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Blackout
Mother is knitting for meA sweater in the dark.Father is on all foursSearching for a black cat.—Charles Simic ■
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A Symposium on Invisibility
Editor's Note: As is always true in the case of our symposia, these contributions were written simultaneously and independently in response to the assigned topic. Any overlaps, parallels, or violent disagreements are therefore purely serendipitous. F
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How To Read A Poem By Dean Young
Indeed this is some suspect interiorredolent of many squished roses,spilled Gatorade and vodka butcompared to having your wings hacked off,a bargain. You're right to worry howeven hiding underwater, fire can find you,what's growing on those rags used
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Are You Jewish?
YOU ARE walking down the street, minding your own business and feeling a little guilty about not calling your mother. Suddenly, you are surrounded. Bearded men in bad suits obstruct your path, brandishing Shabbos candles. “Excuse me,” they say. “Are
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Dancing
A LONG TIME ago, in the years leading up to what was then called the millennium, I worked downtown in the corporate law department of a giant bank. I would drive in from Hollywood, leave my car at one of the five-dollar lots, and, clad in my suit, wa
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Everyone/Everywhere
Life is short. Why not combine everythinginto one poem: my seashellfrom thirty years ago,the little plastic cardinalyou gave me on our first pandemic Christmas,the postcard propped on the windowsill. It's a Duccio of Maryholding her baby close.The ba
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Only a Fragrance
Less than two years ago I wrote an article about signed copies of books turning up in second-hand bookstores, and I concluded by saying, “Fortunately, I haven't as yet come across a signed copy of one of my own novels in a bookstore, one dedicated to
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A Different Take
Goldberg Variations: Ternary Patterns for Insomnia, choreographed by Örjan Andersson, music performed by Scottish Ensemble. Folkoperan, Stockholm, Spring 2022. THERE'S A story about the origins of Bach's Goldberg Variations that suggests it was writt
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Scarecrow Visits a Wheatfield in Auvers
The corvids claim he was a crow. A man,but still a crow, who knew the faith of grainand light, the atomic distinctionbetween stillness and the wind's firstflutter, the shape of lonelinessand dark skies parted by songand wing. He was a vanishing point
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A Rainbow (1945–1975–021)
Several years before he died, before any of us had thought to associate him with a death that might be his, Elton Penn bought the run-down ninety acres directly across the north fork of Birds Branch from his home place, the Jack Beechum place, that h

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