Tin House: Summer 2012 Summer Reading Issue

Don't miss our Summer Reading issue that includes fiction from Amy Hempel and Alice Munro, an essay by Anne Carson, and poetry from Adrienne Rich and Sherman Alexie . . . enjoy summer! Tin House is a beautifully designed periodical featuring the best writers of our time alongside a new generation of talent who are poised to become the most important voices of the future. Content includes short stories, profiles, author interviews, poetry, essays, and unique departments such as "Lost and Found," in which writers review overlooked or underrated books, and "Blithe Spirits" and "Readable Feast," which present tales and recipes for drinks and food in a literary way.

Lee K. Abbott is the author of seven collections of short stories, most recently All Things, All at Once: New & Selected Stories (Norton). His fiction has appeared in nearly one hundred periodicals, including Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, the Georgia Review, Epoch, the Southern Review, and Boulevard. His work has been reprinted in The Best American Short Stories; The O. Henry Awards: The Prize Stories; The Best of the West series; and The Pushcart Prize series. Twice a winner of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, he has published essays and reviews in the New York Times Book Review, the Miami Herald, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. He is Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor in English at the Ohio State University, where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing. Sherman Alexie is the author of, most recently, Face, poetry from Hanging Loose Press, and War Dances, poetry and stories, from Grove Press. He lives with his family in Seattle. Katie Arnold-Ratliff received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is the author of the novel Bright Before Us (Tin House Books). An associate editor of O, The Oprah Magazine, where her writing appears regularly, she lives in New York. Visit her at katiearnoldratliff.com. Sandra Beasley is the author of I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. Other awards for her work include a DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowship, the Friends of Literature Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. Her most recent book is the memoir Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life. She lives in Washington DC. Nina Buckless is currently in the MFA program at the University of Michigan, where she is the recipient of a Zell Fellowship. She is a veteran of Jim Krusoe’s ongoing writing workshop. Her previous work has appeared in the Santa Monica Review and Unsaid. She is a writer-in-residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Project and teaches poetry at Parker Elementary in Detroit Michigan. Anne Carson is a poet, essayist, translator, playwright, and classicist. With her background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art, Carson blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Greek mythology. She is a MacArthur Fellow; she has received the Lannan Prize, the T. S Eliot Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and was an Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, fall 2007. Paul Charles Griffin’s work has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Brooklyn Rail, the New York Press, the Common Review, and other venues. He writes fiction, essays, and book reviews, and he lives and teaches in Brooklyn, New York. Aaron Hamburger was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his short story collection The View from Stalin’s Head (Random House, 2004). His next book, Faith for Beginners (Random House, 2005), was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. His writing has appeared in Poets & Writers, Details, the Forward, Boulevard, and the Village Voice. He has received fellowships from the Edward F. Albee Foundation and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy, as well as residencies from Yaddo and Djerassi. Amy Hempel has won the Rea Award for the Short Story and the PEN/Malamud Award in recent years. Her Collected Stories won the Ambassador Award for Best Fiction of the Year and was one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year. She teaches writing at Harvard and Bennington, and is a founding board member of the Deja Foundation (dejafoundation.org) to aid in adoptions of animals from high-kill shelters. This is her third appearance in Tin House. Gerald Howard is a book editor in New York. His essay on the fiction of the working class, “Never Give an Inch,” appeared in Tin House 45 and was selected for inclusion in the 2011 Pushcart Prize anthology. Kristen Iskandrian lives in Athens, Georgia. Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Gulf Coast, 52 Stories, Memorious, PANK, and many other places. She contributes to HTMLGiant and has a PhD from the University of Georgia. Luis Jaramillo’s first book of short stories, The Doctor’s Wife, was the winner of the 2009 Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Contest and will be published by Dzanc Books in 2012. His work has also been published in Open City and H.O.W. Journal, among other publications. He is the associate chair of the writing program at the New School. Holly Goddard Jones is the author of Girl Trouble, a collection of stories, and her first novel, The Remains, will be released by Touchstone in 2013. Her fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, New Stories from the South, and various literary journals, most recently, Epoch. She teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at UNC Greensboro. Cate Marvin’s second book, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, appeared in 2007. The poems in this issue are from her third book, a work in progress that is forthcoming from Norton. A Whiting Writers’ Award recipient, Marvin is an associate professor at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and cofounder of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts (vidaweb.org). Alexander Maksik’s first novel, You Deserve Nothing, was published in September by Europa Editions. His fiction has appeared in Harvard Review, the New York Times Magazine, and Narrative Magazine, among other publications. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and can be found online at alexandermaksik.com. Alice Munro has published twelve collections of stories, as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. Her thirteenth collection, Dear Life, is forthcoming in November 2012. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Edward MacDowell Medal in literature, and the Man Booker International Prize. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, the Paris Review, and many other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron. Angelo Nikolopoulos is the recipient of the 2011 “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize and a graduate of NYU’s creative writing program. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2011, Boston Review, the Cortland Review, the Gay & Lesbian Review, the Los Angeles Review, Meridian, the New York Quarterly, North American Review, and elsewhere. His first book of poems, Obscenely Yours, is the winner of the 2011 Kinereth Gensler Award and is forthcoming from Alice James Books in May 2013. Francine Prose is a novelist and critic whose latest book, the novel My New American Life, was published by Harper in May 2011. Her previous books include the novels Goldengrove, A Changed Man, and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, and the nonfiction books Reading Like A Writer: A Guide For People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them and Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, the Afterlife. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, among them the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edith Wharton Achievement Award for Literature, Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, and is a past president of PEN American Center. She lives in New York City. Barbara Ras is the author of three books of poems, most recently, The Last Skin. Previous books include Bite Every Sorrow and One Hidden Stuff. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, TriQuarterly, the American Scholar, Five Points, Massachusetts Review, and Orion, as well as many other magazines and anthologies. She directs Trinity University Press in San Antonio, Texas. Adrienne Rich was born in 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland. She has published over sixteen volumes of poetry and five volumes of critical prose. Her most recent books are Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007–2010 and Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004–2006. A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, appeared in 2009. Robin Romm is the author of two books. Her story collection, The Mother Garden, was a finalist for the PEN USA literary award. Her memoir, The Mercy Papers, was a New York Times Notable Book, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, and a Top Ten Nonfiction Book according to Entertainment Weekly. Her writing has appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, the Observer, O, The Oprah Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, the Sun, Tin House, One Story, and the Threepenny Review. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review. Jess Row is the author of two collections of stories, The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost. His work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, Conjunctions, and many other publications, as well as three times in the The Best American Short Stories. He lives in Princeton and teaches at the College of New Jersey. Bennett Sims lives in Iowa City. His fiction has appeared in A Public Space and Zoetrope: All-Story.