From 1887 to a month before his death in 1910, French author and playwright Jules Renard composed an autobiographical masterpiece.  Celebrated abroad and cited as a principal influence by writers as various as Somerset Maugham, Susan Sontag, and Donald Barthelme, The Journal of Jules Renard has developed a cultish following.  Over the course of decades, Renard develops not only his career and artistic convictions but also his humanity. He reflects on art and literature–and their accompanying social scenes–and moments from his personal life that he so often mined in his work (his love interests, his position as a socialist mayor of Chitry, the suicide of his father).  A mix of aphorizms, observations, short scenes, gossip, jokes, and meditations, The Journal of Jules Renard anticipated the lyric essays and memoir of the twenty-first century, but it’s a unique work all its own.

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The Möbius Strip Club of Grief is a collection of poems that weave in and out of a burlesque purgatory where the living pay—dearly, with both money and conscience—to watch the dead perform scandalous acts otherwise unseen: “$20 for five minutes. I’ll hold your hand in my own,” one ghost says. “I’ll tell you you were good to me.” Like Dante before her, Stone positions herself as the living poet passing through and observing the land of the dead. She imagines a feminist Limbo where women run the show and create a space to navigate the difficulties endured in life. With a nod to her grandmother Ruth Stone’s poem “The Möbius Strip of Grief,” Stone creates a labyrinthine underworld as a way to confront and investigate complicated family relationships in the hopes of breaking the never-ending cycle of grief.

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“Freebird is such a timely book. considering the current deep divisions between right and left. A new classic for the collapsing political landscape of America.”

—Kim Gordon, author of Girl in a Band

The Singers, an all-American family in the California style, are about to lose everything. Anne is a bureaucrat in the Los Angeles Office of Sustainability whose ideals are compromised by a proposal from a venture capitalist seeking to privatize the city’s wastewater. Her brother, Ben, a former Navy SEAL, returns from Afghanistan disillusioned and struggling with PTSD, and starts down a path toward a radical act of violence. And Anne’s teenage son, Aaron, can’t decide if he should go to college or pitch it all and hit the road. They all live inside the long shadow of the Singer patriarch Grandpa Sam, whose untold experience of the Holocaust shapes his family’s moral character to the core.
Jon Raymond, screenwriter of the acclaimed films Meek’s Cutoffand Night Moves, combines these narrative threads into a hard-driving story of one family’s moral crisis. In Freebird, Raymond delivers a brilliant, searching novel about death and politics in America today, revealing how the fates of our families are irrevocably tied to the currents of history.

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We envisioned the theme of True Crime as a way to engage with our country’s voyeuristic obsession with rogues and outlaws, the Starkweathers marauding our badlands. Justin St. Germain, in his essay “Murder Tourism in Middle America,” returns to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and visits the Kansas village of Holcomb as a way to confront his own mother’s murder. The fiction writers take us into the gray, Tayari Jones exploring a night in question in an excerpt from her new novel, An American Marriage, and in her short story “Rescue,” Karen Shepard unravels a tight-knit community’s reluctance to face the truth about a deadly hit-and- run. Hafizah Geter’s searing “Testimony” series of four poems—for Eric Garner, for Michael Brown, for Sandra Bland, for Tamir Rice—gives voices to those silenced by police brutality. Claire McQuerry’s poems view the American dream through the jaundiced lens of the subprime mortgage scandal. And Matthew Zapruder’s “Paul Ryan” is a grand indictment that offers the rarest gifts—grace and transcendence from our current criminal state. Where there is friction, there is fire. We hope that this incendiary issue burns clear and bright.

Note: eBooks of True Crime are not available yet.

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For readers of Roddy Doyle, Nick Hornby, and Mark Haddon, The Adulterants is a piercingly funny take on how hard it is to grow up and how hard it is when you don’t. 

The Adulterants is narrated by Ray, a thirty-something freelance tech journalist living with his pregnant wife in North East London, staring down the barrel of long-deferred adulthood. Ray is chronically underachieving and empathy-impaired, a deadpan antihero whom―by the end of the book―readers will end up rooting for, as fatherhood looms and his life implodes. Throughout a series of escalating catastrophes, he keeps up a merciless mental commentary on the foibles and failings of those around him, and the vicissitudes of modern urban life: internet trolls, sadistic estate agents, open marriages, and the threat posed by more sensitive men. The trick of the book is making you feel empathy for Ray even as you acknowledge that he gets what’s coming to him.

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With a new introduction by Karen Russell, the 40th anniversary edition of The Changeling is a visionary fairy tale and a work of mythic genius by one of our best writers.

Forty years later, The Changeling is no less haunting and no less visionary than the day it was published, but it has only become clearer that Joy Williams is a virtuosic stylist and a singular thinker―a genius in every sense of the word.

When we first meet Pearl―young in years but advanced in her drinking―she’s on the lam, sitting at a hotel bar in Florida, throwing back gin and tonics with her infant son cradled in the crook of her arm. But her escape is brief, and the relief she feels at having fled her abusive husband, and the Northeastern island his family calls home, doesn’t last for long. Soon she’s being shepherded back. The island, for Pearl, is a place of madness and pain, and her round-the-clock drinking spurs on the former even if it dulls the latter. And through this lens―Pearl’s fragile consciousness―readers encounter the horror and triumph of both childhood and motherhood in a new light.

With language that flits between exuberance and elegy, the plainspoken and the poetic, Joy Williams has blended, as Rick Moody writes, “the arresting improbabilities of magic realism, with the surrealism of the folkloric revival . . . and with the modernist foreboding of Under the Volcano,” and created something entirely original and entirely consuming.

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With fiction, poetry, and essays regularly appearing in the Best American, Pushcart Prize, and O. Henry anthologies, you’ll fall in love with every installment. Our favorite writers talk craft in our Interviews department and expand our reading lists in our Lost and Found section. Hungry? Thirsty? Our Readable Feasts and Blithe Spirits have you covered, with appetizing recipes and delicious stories to go along with them. We expand our horizons with every theme issue, where we’ve honed our sights on topics ranging from work to appetites to just plain evil.

Best of all? Your print subscription to Tin House magazine includes a bonus digital subscription absolutely free! Order today and we’ll send an email prompting you to login and set up your digital access. Each issue of your subscription you’ll receive an email notice alerting that your digital issue is ready for download. Formats are available for Kindle and Apple readers.

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New York City, 1962. Vera Kelly is struggling to make rent and blend into the underground gay scene in Greenwich Village. She’s working night shifts at a radio station when her quick wits, sharp tongue, and technical skills get her noticed by a recruiter for the CIA. Next thing she knows she’s in Argentina, tasked with wiretapping a congressman and infiltrating a group of student activists in Buenos Aires. As Vera becomes more and more enmeshed with the young radicals, the fragile local government begins to split at the seams. When a betrayal leaves her stranded in the wake of a coup, Vera learns the Cold War makes for strange and unexpected bedfellows, and she’s forced to take extreme measures to save herself. An exhilarating page turner and perceptive coming-of-age story, Who Is Vera Kelly? introduces an original, wry and whip-smart female spy for the twenty-first century.

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Building on IRL and Nature Poem, Tommy Pico’s Junk is a book-length break-up poem that explores the experience of loss and erasure, both personal and cultural.

The third book in Tommy Pico’s Teebs trilogy, Junk is a breakup poem in couplets: ice floe and hot lava, a tribute to Janet Jackson and nacho cheese. In the static that follows the loss of a job or an apartment or a boyfriend, what can you grab onto for orientation? The narrator wonders what happens to the sense of self when the illusion of security has been stripped away. And for an indigenous person, how do these lost markers of identity echo larger cultural losses and erasures in a changing political landscape? In part taking its cue from A.R. Ammons’s Garbage, Teebs names this liminal space “Junk,” in the sense that a junk shop is full of old things waiting for their next use; different items that collectively become indistinct. But can there be a comfort outside the anxiety of utility? An appreciation of “being” for the sake of being? And will there be Chili Cheese Fritos?

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“The Seas took me back to how I felt as a kid, when you’re newly falling in love with literature, newly shocked by its capacity to cast a spell…”–Maggie Nelson (from the Introduction)

Moored in a coastal fishing town set so far north that the highways only run south the unnamed narrator of The Seas is a misfit. She’s often the subject of cruel local gossip. Her father, a sailor, walked into the ocean eleven years earlier and never returned, leaving his wife and daughter to keep a forlorn vigil. Surrounded by water and beckoned by the sea, she clings to what her father once told her: that she is a mermaid.

True to myth, she finds herself in hard love with a land-bound man, an Iraq War veteran thirteen years her senior. The mesmerizing, fevered coming-of-age tale that follows will land her in jail. Her otherworldly escape will become the stuff of legend.

With the inventive brilliance and psychological insight that have earned her international acclaim, Samantha Hunt pulls readers into an undertow of impossible love and intoxication, blurring the lines between reality and fairy tale, hope and delusion, sanity and madness.

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In a series of conversations with Between The Covers’s David Naimon, Ursula K. Le Guin discusses her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry―both her process and her philosophy―with all the wisdom, profundity, and rigour we expect from one of our great American writers.

When the New York Times called Ursula K. Le Guin, “America’s greatest living science fiction writer,” they just might have undersold her legacy. It’s hard to look at her vast body of work―novels and stories across multiple genres, poems, translations, essays, speeches, and criticism―and see anything but one of our greatest writers, period.

In a series of interviews with David Naimon (Between the Covers), Le Guin discusses craft, aesthetics, and philosophy in her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction respectively. The discussions provide ample advice and guidance for writers of every level, but also give Le Guin a chance to to sound off on some of her favorite subjects: the genre wars, the patriarchy, the natural world, and what, in her opinion, makes for great writing. With excerpts from her own work and those books that she’s looked to for inspiration and guidance, this volume will be a treat for Le Guin’s longtime readers and a perfect introduction for those first approaching her writing.

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In her short story “The Wolves,” Kseniya Melnik blends Russian fairy tales with Stalin-era paranoia to bring us closer to the feeling of Russian history while at the same time shining light on the dark underpinnings of our current moment. In an excerpt from her forthcoming novel, Red Clocks, Leni Zumas gives us a world where abortion has been outlawed, creating a state that feels like a lucid dream. In this issue we have more poetry than usual, as it seems contemporary poets are especially attuned to the productive ambiguity frequency and now is one of those zeitgeist moments when we most need them. Paisley Rekdal, in her poem “Marsyas,” writes that Apollo “never understands what he plays, / knowing only how his hand / trembles over the plucked muscle: / adding, he thinks, something lower to the notes, / something sweeter, and infinitely strange.”

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An exhilarating literary mystery, Swimming Lessons keeps readers guessing until the final page.

Disenchanted by the life in which she’s found herself, Ingrid Coleman writes letters to her husband, Gil, about the truth of their passionate and troubled marriage. She hides them, unread, in the thousands of books Gil has collected over the years. Then she disappears from a Dorset beach, leaving behind her dilapidated house by the sea, her husband, and her two young daughters, Flora and Nan.

Twelve years later, Gil thinks he sees Ingrid from a bookshop window, but he’s getting older and his unlikely sighting is chalked up to senility. Flora, who has never believed Ingrid drowned, returns home to care for her father and investigate her mother’s disappearance. But what Flora doesn’t realize is that the answers to her questions are hidden in the books that surround her. Scandalous and smart, Swimming Lessons holds the Coleman family up to the light, exposing the mysterious truths of a turbulent marriage and the dangerous fault lines that remain.

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Such is the universal sugar rush that all desirous things—wrapped in a sweater or snorted through a straw—are compared to candy. Steven Millhauser, in his story “Guided Tour,” plays with the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, while Maria Adelmann reimagines Hansel and Gretel. In “Candy: A Footnote,” Rebecca Makkai breaks down her Hungarian family’s history of bootlegging candies behind the Iron Curtain. In his bittersweet essay, “Sweetness Mattered” Aaron Hamburger recalls his queer awakening as he tried to woo his high school crush with Smarties. As with Red Vines, you can’t just scarf a single poem. Timothy Liu’s “Ode to Candy Crush” and “Love Poem,” Kaveh Akbar’s “In the Beginning” and “I Wouldn’t Even Know What to Do with a Third Chance,” and Lucy Anderton’s “The Joy of Sex” dance between sweetness and nausea. Dip into the Lost & Found section and you’ll be treated to Emma Komlos-Hrobsky’s pointedly sour reassessment of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Like an Everlasting Gobstopper, this issue will keep your taste buds infinitely engaged.

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A book-length poem navigating belief, black lives, the tragedies of Trump, and the boundaries of being a woman.

When Rap Spoke Straight to God isn’t sacred or profane, but a chorus joined in a single soliloquy, demanding to be heard. There’s Wu-Tang and Mary Magdelene with a foot fetish, Lil’ Kim and a self-loving Lilith. Slurs, catcalls, verses, erasures―Dawson asks readers, “Just how far is it to nigger?” Both grounded and transcendent, the book is reality and possibility. Dawson’s work has always been raw; but, When Rap Spoke Straight to God is as blunt as the answer to that earlier question: “Here.” Sometimes abrasive and often abraded, Dawson doesn’t flinch.

A mix of traditional forms where sonnets mash up with sestinas morphing to heroic couplets, When Rap Spoke Straight to God insists that while you may recognize parts of the poem’s world, you can’t anticipate how it will evolve.

With a literal exodus of light in the book’s final moments, When Rap Spoke Straight to God is a lament for and a celebration of blackness.  It’s never depression; it’s defiance―a persistent resistance. In this book, like Wu-Tang says, the marginalized “ain’t nothing to fuck with.”

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For fans of Mark Haddon, Tony Earley, and Jonathan Safran Foer, an epic tale of boyhood from an unforgettable new voice.

“Disorienting, weirdly wise, indescribably transparent, impossibly recognizable. Fun, too.” ―Joy Williams

A Key to Treehouse Living is the adventure of William Tyce, a boy without parents who grows up near a river in the rural Midwest. In a glossary-style list, he imparts his particular wisdom on subjects ranging from ASPHALT PATHS, BETTA FISH, and MULLET to MORTAL BETRAYAL, NIHILISM, and REVELATION. His improbable quest―to create a reference volume specific to his existence―takes him on a journey down the river by raft (see MYSTICAL VISION, see NAVIGATING BIG RIVERS BY NIGHT). He seeks to discover how his mother died (see ABSENCE) and find reasons for his father’s disappearance (see UNCERTAINTY, see VANITY). But as he goes about defining his changing world, all kinds of extraordinary and wonderful things happen to him.

Unlocking an earnest, clear-eyed way of thinking that might change your own, A Key to Treehouse Living is a story about keeping your own record straight and living life by a different code.

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Teenage girls tell their most urgent stories, punctuated by inspiration and advice from Zadie Smith, Roxane Gay, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker, and more of today’s great writers.

Girls Write Now: Two Decades of True Stories from Young Female Voices offers a brave and timely portrait of teenage-girl life in the United States over the past twenty years. They’re working part-time jobs to make ends meet, deciding to wear a hijab to school, sharing a first kiss, coming out to their parents, confronting violence and bullying, and immigrating to a new country while holding onto their heritage. Through it all, these young writers tackle issues of race, gender, poverty, sex, education, politics, family, and friendship. Together their narratives capture indelible snapshots of the past and lay bare hopes, insecurities, and wisdom for the future.

Interwoven is advice from great women writers―Roxane Gay, Francine Prose, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, Quiara Alegria Hudes, Janet Mock, Gloria Steinem, Lena Dunham, Mia Alvar, and Alice Walker―offering guidance to a young reader about where she’s been and where she might go. Inspiring and informative, Girls Write Now belongs in every school, library and home, adding much-needed and long-overdue perspectives on what it is to be young in America.

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Funny, poignant, and galvanizing by turns, Josephine Wilson’s award-winning novel explores many kinds of extinction―natural, racial, national, and personal―and what we might do to prevent them.

Professor Frederick Lothian, retired engineer, has quarantined himself in a place he hates: a retirement village. His headstrong wife Martha, adored by all, is dead. His adopted daughter Caroline has cut ties, and his son Callum is lost to him in his own way. And though Frederick knows, logically, that a structural engineer can devise a bridge for any situation, somehow his own troubled family―fractured by years of secrets and lies―is always just out of his reach.

When a series of unfortunate incidents brings him and his spirited next-door neighbor Jan together, Frederick gets a chance to build something new in the life he has left. At the age of 69, he has to confront his most complex emotional relationships and the haunting questions he’s avoided all his life. Unbeknownst to him, Caroline―on her own journey of cultural reckoning―is doing the same. As father and daughter fight in their own ways to save what’s lost, they might finally find a way toward each other.

A masterful portrait of a man caught by history, and a sweeping meditation on the meaning of family, love, survival, and identity, Extinctions asks an urgent question: can we find the courage to change?

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Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her esteemed 1969 novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, “I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.” And what a fierce truth our Portland neighbor told, right up until her journey’s end. Whenever we had the great fortune to publish her, we would take page proofs up the hill to her house, where she would chuckle at our foolishness over tea. In this issue we present a last, long short story, “Pity and Shame,” which is filled with her trademark inventiveness and dark humor. I imagine she would be happy with the company in these pages, the other six short stories along with the three essays, all written by women. The passed torch burns bright in the hands of Catherine Lacey, who, in her story “The Grand Claremont Hotel,” concocts an infinitely pleasing luxury hotel. You can also see the fiery connection in emerging writer Abbey Mei Otis’ fiercely imagined story “Rich People.” Elissa Schappell divines the magic of Chartreuse, a botanical liqueur made by Carthusian monks in silence and secrecy (the formula of one-hundred-plus herbs has been locked away for centuries). The liqueur was originally formulated in the eighteenth century as the “Elixir of Long Life,” but one wouldn’t be surprised if it had been conjured by the mind and pen of Le Guin. She will be deeply missed. Luckily for all of us, her words and spirit live on.

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From the author of Our Endless Numbered Days and Swimming Lessons, Bitter Orange is a seductive psychological portrait, a keyhole into the dangers of longing and how far a woman might go to escape her past.

From the attic of Lyntons, a dilapidated English country mansion, Frances Jellico sees them―Cara first: dark and beautiful, then Peter: striking and serious. The couple is spending the summer of 1969 in the rooms below hers while Frances is researching the architecture in the surrounding gardens. But she’s distracted. Beneath a floorboard in her bathroom, she finds a peephole that gives her access to her neighbors’ private lives.

To Frances’ surprise, Cara and Peter are keen to get to know her. It is the first occasion she has had anybody to call a friend, and before long they are spending every day together: eating lavish dinners, drinking bottle after bottle of wine, and smoking cigarettes until the ash piles up on the crumbling furniture. Frances is dazzled.

But as the hot summer rolls lazily on, it becomes clear that not everything is right between Cara and Peter. The stories that Cara tells don’t quite add up, and as Frances becomes increasingly entangled in the lives of the glamorous, hedonistic couple, the boundaries between truth and lies, right and wrong, begin to blur. Amid the decadence, a small crime brings on a bigger one: a crime so terrible that it will brand their lives forever.

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