To the Left, With Style

The Kenyon Review, a magazine of Kenyon College, Ohio, has a seventy year history of publishing the best writing of today or any day. With an advisory board that contains the likes of Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Fulton, and E.L. Doctorow, that's to be expected. 

This issue celebrates the posting of their archives to the Internet. As editor David Lynn says "We are in the business not of business but of ensuring the widest possible readership for The Kenyon Review."

Volume XXX, Fall, 2008, begins with reviews by Andre Bernard and follows this with poems from the winners of the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers. The poets may be young, but the quality of the poetry makes me wonder how I can ever think to call myself a poet again.

Several other poets are presented including Mary Szybist and Anna Journey, but it is the short stories that grab at your heart. "Sandlot," by W. David Hall, is set in Afghanistan and describes a baseball game stained by the insanity of war. In "Memory is the Key," the authors, Simon J. Ortiz and Gabriele Schwab, alternate telling their stories, each circling around the affect of memories in their lives.

In "The Torturer's Wife," Thomas Glave has reproduced Lady Macbeth's descent into murder and madness. Set in a modern paradise controlled by terror, people disappear during midnight flights over the ocean, while a charismatic military leader parades his stunningly lovely wife through mansions and banquets. This is a story that, once read, will replay itself in your nightmares forever.

Overall, the journal is beautifully published and very well laid out. It's cover photograph, "Forester's Child" is black and white and evokes a lost time and culture. August Sander, the photographer, lived and worked in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. His historic work, "People of the Twentieth Century" contained 500-600 shots of people in various social levels and professions.

The Kenyon Review accepts submissions of essays, comedy, drama, and poetry, all uploaded through their website from September 15th to January 15th. Writers, be warned, the content is both liberally political and humanistic. It is also of the very highest literary standards.