No. 19,

ARIAS. There is no pleasure like that afforded by finding someone in 1833 being dead right about 2009. Michel de Chevalier was sent by his government to learn how France might follow America’s modernity. He met with everyone, brought home masses of statistics, but also understood – as America’s recently vacated financiers didn’t – the close relationship between Money and Trust. Richard G. Stern, one of our most elegant fiction writers, is also a smart reporter: the election is past by three months, but Stern’s perceptions ought to serve to forestall any incipient nostalgia for the disaster on the Republican watch.

TEXTS. Jean Braithwaite offers a savvy story set in the unlikely milieu of one of those academic meetings this editor has spent his life avoiding. An importuning fraud out on Dupont Circle is probably matched, though she doesn’t say so, by a number of frauds upstairs where the interviews take place. Tom Andes has written a faux-Gothic southern romance about an obsessive and filthy old man and his Beloved, a special chaise-percée which is the engine of his own destruction. By coincidence, the Academy – in this case a high school in Turkey – figures in a brilliant story by James Wyatt. His hero, his stalking nemesis (a dreadful adolescent with a powerfully rich Dad), and his horrid principal, the nightmare kind, are artfully woven together and brought, via Andrew Marvell, to a deeply moving conclusion. Finally, Marek Bienczyk, whose acclaimed novel Tworke should be appearing shortly in English, tells a touching story of parting excerpted from his first novel, Terminus. Bienczyk, who lives in Warsaw – as does Wyatt currently – is widely considered a leading light in the generation that follows the great Polish writers of the last century. With reason.

ART Our designer and associate, Ornan Rotem, whose Sylph Editions are a model of cool and elegant book-making is also – besides having been a professor of Middle Eastern philosophy (if I have that right) – a photographer, a movie and opera buff, and a translator. He inaugurates a centerfold which we hope to continue in future issues. Josef Czapski, whose Memories of Starobielsk appears in No. 20, lived through three wars and the Bolshevik Revolution. He was also a brilliant painter, a diarist, and one of his century’s most astute and jargon-free writer on the countless painters he met and worked alongside in his ninety-seven years.

POETRY Carrie Etter caught our eye with the very first poems of hers to appear in print. With such poets our policy is to let them have space and choose how to fill it. There is also a fine piece by Michael Coffey on Paul Muldoon’s Yarrow, which is – as good talk about literature should be – about the experience of reading Muldoon. There follows a much briefer than usual conspectus of recent books read by the Editor and, of course, PB’s usual acerbic Notebook

“… one of the ten best literary magazines…" (Library Journal)