Spring 2024

The Threepenny Review

One of most original literary magazines on the entire planet

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The Threepenny Review
Editor and Publisher: Wendy Lesser Associate Editors: Evgeniya Dame Rose Whitmore Art Advisor: Allie Haeusslein Proofreader: Paula Brisco Consulting Editors: Geoff Dyer Deborah Eisenberg Jonathan Franzen Ian McEwan Robert Pinsky Kay Ryan Tobias Wolff
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Contributors
Wendell Berry is a poet, fiction-writer, essayist, and environmental activist. Recent publications include The Art of Loading Brush, Stand by Me, and two volumes of essays in the Library of America series. T. J. Clark's next book is Those Passions: O
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The Illustrations
The ex-circus strongman shared his armed-robbery cell with a philologist, a tattoo artist Latinist who inked lines and pictures out of Ovid. His Artemis sleeved down one over-muscled arm; down the other, terrified Philomel trilled from the tree Daphn
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Table Talk
THE MEDIEVAL science of Angelology occupies itself with the nature, constitution, and organization of the supernal race of angels. What might a Scammerology discover about these invisible, realitybased order of sub-beings? The phone rings. I know the
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A Note On The Artworks
Kristine Potter cites two inspirations for her project Dark Waters, from which the images in this issue are taken. The first are her memories of growing up in Georgia, near a place called Murder Creek. Traveling across the eight southern states as an
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Alcatraz
How quickly one gets from A to Z, how swiftly one says everything there is to see: these bars, for instance, and the flexible fencing of sharks, and how impossibly far it is—this life from that. ■
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The Self, Wherever She Is
Grand Tour by Elisa Gonzalez. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023, $26.00 cloth. “WE MEET no Stranger but Ourself”: Emily Dickinson's haunting pronouncement on the plight of the individual consciousness may be cited less often than the bit about her head f
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Self-Portrait
Before I was born, I was conceived. Some used to say that girl sperm had short tails, and thick skin, so they got there slowly, and could hang around hours or days as the golden majesty of the egg moved down out of the blister-door of the ovary. But
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Photo Credits
Front Cover: Baben, 2019. 3: Welter Sky 1 2018. 4: The Weight, 2015. 6: Impasse at Sodom's Creek, 2017. 8: The Medium, 2017. 12: Frankie, 2022. 13: Flora, 2n023. 14: The Fight, 2019. 16: Knoxville Girl, 2016. 17: Delia, 2017. 18: Nell, 2017. 20: Rosi
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Kafka On The Tram
Enrique Vila-Matas ON ONCE again re-reading the penultimate fragment of Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten—the part where Herr Benjamenta and the narrator go off traveling together, dreaming of absolute freedom—I sense a possible family resemblance wit
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What's What
SHE WAS dying, that was the first thing. The first thing was that she was dying. She was thirty-four, and it was the sunset of her life, though both of them still had the teenager's belief that death would pass them by. In the hospital, she said to h
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D'Aulaires on My Grandmother's Deck
In D'Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, Zeus was always marrying different nymphs, that's what it said, married, no mention of abduct or rape or even forcible kiss. I wanted to marry Zeus. Also cow-stealing Hermes, also Theseus who refused the brigand on
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Fractions
One third of this poem is a lie; I'll let you decide which. I missed the irises this year. They bloom for a breath of May, their purple lips parted like suns. I had my excuses: so much to do, so much reaching. Gathering stems in a shattered vase. My
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A Symposium on Anger
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. A
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Contents Under Pressure
Henry Taylor: B Side, at the Whitney Museum, New York, October 4, 2023-January 28, 2024. IN 1946, intoxicated during his stay at a Los Angeles hotel, the saxophonist and jazz revolutionary Charlie Parker set fire to his bedsheets and ran naked throug
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High C
This spring your whole inner life is Little Richard.You surrender to his octave-jumping high notes as he shakes out the fringes of his glittering coat. His boots glitter, too. How narrow, those feet. And those wigs! How full. “Is that your hair?” he'
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What's So Great About a String Quartet?
Emerson String Quartet: Farewell Performance, Alice Tully Hall, New York, October 21, 2023. Danish String Quartet, Richardson Auditorium, Princeton, November 2, 2023. LET ME start by making a case for the form itself. The term is both musical and hum
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November
Where is my dear sixteen-year-old cat I wish to carry upstairs in my arms looking up at me and thinking be careful, dear human Sixteen years. How many days since I found you as if an urchin in a snowstorm and you moved in assured learned the territor
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The Stackpole Legend
ONCE IN time, as Art Rowanberry would put it, a boy, the only child of a couple advanced in years, entered the world in the neighborhood of Port William, to be distinguished after his second day by the name of Delinthus Stackpole. His name did him no
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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, and the George Lichter Family Fund. Our writer payments are underwritten by our Writers’ Circle, which includes Robert Bau
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The Genius
IN THE 1940s, the only first-rate filmmakers who worked steadily and at their best in Hollywood were Orson Welles, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, and Preston Sturges. All of them began to turn out movies in Hollywood
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Italics
have a whispery urgency, words slanted forward as if hurried by breezes in a dream or a thought or a poem copied out by Petrarch, his compact hand imitated in type by Manutius in 1501, chiseled upright Roman letters softened, sloped, lightened, text'
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The Grand Canal, Venice, 1970
I TOOK A train from Florence to Venice to meet Peggy Guggenheim. Paul Bowles suggested I visit her, since I was going to be in Italy, as a possible sponsor of Antaeus, the literary magazine he and I had just started in Tangier. I had the letter of in
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Thanks to Our Donors
We are grateful to the following individuals, who in 2023 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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Final Snow Of The Season
The last time he called, our friendship lacked insulation. Each of us drafty, an absence, steady drips from a sun-warmed roof devouring the snow. He told me about a new client, some ball player I could tell he wished that I knew. I told him about the
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My Summers at Le Chambon-sur-Lignon
DURING THE years when Jews were hounded in France and in the rest of Europe, I spent my summers, between the ages of nine and twelve, with my younger brother Philippe and our Alsatian Catholic caretaker Mazéle (short for Mademoiselle) in hiding in a

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