Winter 2023

The Threepenny Review

One of most original literary magazines on the entire planet

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Contributors
Elvis Bego is a writer based in Copenhagen. Simone Di Piero’s recent books are a collection of poems, The Complaints, and Fat: New and Uncollected Prose. Allie Dixon is a professor of communications at Emmanuel College and a writer for the Office of
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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
BENEATH MARKET Street, in San Francisco, live half a dozen teenage runaways who pool the day’s panhandling coins to buy the evening’s cheapest bag of heroin. Some date each other, some write poetry, some have sleeping bags and many have dogs, so that
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To Be a Person
To be a person is an untenable proposition. Odd of proportion,upright,unbalanced of body, feeling, and mind.Two predators’ eyesface forward,yet seem always to be trying to look back.Unhooved, untaloned fingersseem to grasp mostly grief and pain.To cr
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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 photographs in this issue were taken by the artist Graciela Iturbide. Although the majority were shot in her native Mexico, others were taken in the United States and India. Given the artist’s calm capture of deep shadow and stark silhouette, as
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The Phone Call
I WAS ALREADY in the car when I got the call. I knew it was going to be involved so I took a right into a neighborhood and pulled over just before the cul-de-sac. I flicked the headlights off as I shifted gears to park and picked up my phone vibratin
The Threepenny Review7 min readPoverty & Homelessness
Affording to Live
ALONG TIME ago, in a different life, I was married to a very rich young man. His mother used to give me diamond and ruby bracelets, and dresses from Paris, which I never wore. For the three years of our marriage, guilt over his family’s millions made
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Junky Brother Blues
I collect his birthdays like they aremy handsrubbing together emptyI break them open simple as wintershaking like earth searchingfor a vacant new moonthese days are bare skintrees and snow embracedunderneathat night I stitch cold into blanketsto walk
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Photo Credits
Front Cover: Tehuantapec, México, 1985. 3: La niña del peine, Juchitán, Mexico, 1979. 4: Serafina, Juchitán, Mexico, 1985. 7: Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2013. 8: Perros perdidos, Rajastan, India, 1998. 11: Camión de Came, Ciudad de México, 1973. 17: Cerdeña,
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Come with Me
I DIDN’T REMEMBER my parents. Ba died when I was six, almost ten years ago. My mother just left one day, dropping me off at pre-school and never coming back. In photos, she was pale and thin, unsmiling, her billowing dresses reminding me of plastic b
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The Big One
Sister Maria in third grade homeroomtold us to disregard the rumorthat the San Andreas faultwill level The City’s masonryincluding our Chinatown schoolhouseThursday morning, after whichthere will be no school,no tests, no homeworks dueforever. Channe
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Winchester House
ABOUT TWENTY years ago a friend from my childhood, Skanda, gave me a photograph of a boarding school in Colombo that I had gone to at a very young age for two or three years. Skanda was a relative but only in the Sri Lankan sense, where everyone you
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The Hairbrush
It’s waiting on the bureau, as if you’ll comeand nose into the desiccated smellof your old age and unwashed hair that leakedinto your cabled cap and headphone cuffs,the sofa bolster, pillow case, scarves,some dander fuzz clinging to the bristles,with
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The Nabokov Canon
THE MORE time that passes following Vladimir Nabokov’s death in 1977, the more intriguing it becomes to read or re-read his books and realize that his body of work, which during his lifetime seemed very eccentric and unconventional—the product of far
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Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Gift Subscription
1. You agree with Louise Glück that Threepenny is “as lively and original a magazine as exists in this country… Not an issue goes by without some unexpected marvel.” 2. You’re in possession of singularly valuable information: only you can judge which
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The Philosopher as Writer: Remembering Bernard Williams
HE WAS known primarily as a philosopher, which is what he did professionally. I think he was quite a good philosopher, though I am not, of course, in a position to judge his work the way a philosophy professor might have judged it. But then one of Be
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The Hoard Unlocked
The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English by Hana Videen. Princeton University Press, 2022, $19.95 (cloth). WHEN MY brother was a toddler, he coined three phrases that have lodged themselves into my family’s private vocabulary where, more than twenty y
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Passion and Form
Ah, they have kissed!The rhymeComes in unnoticed. ■
The Threepenny Review1 min readInternet & Web
The Threepenny Review Is Now Available On Jstor
STOR We are pleased to announce that back issues of The Threepenny Review are available online through JSTOR, the not-for-profit digital archive. Researchers may search, browse, download, and print the full-text PDF versions from the journal’s first
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My Audience
THEY LIVE in Texas and work supervising immigrant landscapers, live on farms with their extended families. Their patriarchs committed suicide after years of drinking so much that they disappeared for days on end. They hid their booze bottles in the b
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Garbo
GRETA GARBO, who radiated sophisticated cultivation and psychic weariness on screen, in fact came from a working-class Stockholm family; she never even finished high school, because her father’s death left them in such dire circumstances that she had
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A Little Action
Without a bet on baseball, my father’s souland body were out of phase or focus.Only, as he called it, “a little action on the side,”Saw buck, ten spot, two bits or a penny,with anyone really, man, woman, child,even the family dog we didn’t have,could
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The Timeless Room
WHENEVER I’M feeling down, or up, or really much of anything, I go to Times Square. More specifically, I go to the theater on 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. It’s not your typical Broadway theater, per se—though it’s got as much charm as any
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Fragments From A Family Sketchbook
We must have looked like one of those illustrated familiesdepicted in surreal storybooks, riding in an impossibly rendered car—a vehicle as tall as two adjacent city apartment buildings,with the combined addresses of 1977 Ford Fiesta, 1967 Volkswagen
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On Bach
WE KNOW so little about him. There is the usual moth-eaten anecdote of the “moonlight manuscript,” the prohibited book of music that the defiant teenage Sebastian, orphaned and living at his older brother’s house, copied note by note in the dark when
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Monster
S ARRIVED IN Copenhagen on a ferry late in the Bosnian war. He’d “seen some horrible things,” worked crappy jobs, scrubbed a lot of old people’s ovens, washed towers of dishes, then got a job in a good kitchen, learned the ropes, worked his way up, h
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Medusa
takes her pills from a paper cup,never sits, will not be touched;she walks the halls, eyes downcast,a warning swinging at her back.Committed by the state she reignsPriestess of Ward C, circlesthe hour in disposable slippers,crowned by the fury they m

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