Dad couldn’t stop smiling as he demonstrated the trap’s operation. The inner workings were so efficient that it barely made a noise, just a faint click and a soft flourish like an umbrella being opened. Dad had designed the trap to accommodate a raccoon the size of a sheepdog, but he still worried that it might maim the creature if it wasn’t calibrated just right. Eventually he went into the garage to take from the deep freeze one of the birthday cakes he’d purchased for bait, placing it on my skateboard and rolling it to the middle of the platform. If the cake survived the trap he said we could celebrate by having it for dessert that night.
So writes Seth Fried as he takes us on a family’s strange and tender journey to capture a mischievous raccoon.
Join Tin House on a journey of our own towards the luminous, the wild, and the everyday-surreal in our dazzling new issue, #74: Winter Reading. Visit the Stalin-era dreamscape of “The Wolves,” as a pregnant young woman’s paranoia confects with Russian fairy tales; take your sleep like medicine in Delaney Nolan’s “At The Center”; or hear the unexpected tick of the biological clock in an excerpt from Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks. Plus, find poetry and essays, coy and unruly and white hot, ready to spin through your mind on winter’s longest nights.
Featuring:
Fiction from Kseniya Melnik, Leni Zumas, Seth Fried, Sofi Stambo, Tania James, and Delaney Nolan
Poetry from Chen Chen, Ada Limón, Carl Philips, Craig Beaven, Lauren Haldeman, Bianca Stone, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Taylor Johnson, John Koethe, Paisley Rekdal, Abigail Chabitnoy, David Baker, Elizabeth Bradfield, Rick Barot, Curtis Bauer, Megan Fernandes, Matthew Siegel, Marcus Jackson, and Ross White
Nonfiction from Ginger Gaffney and Mark Steinetz
Books Lost & Found from John Fischer, Casandra Cleghorn, Chris Carroll, Joseph Frankel, and Rohan Meitzen
And a Blithe Spirit from Ann Tashi Slater.
As you might imagine, I have several bookshelves filled with copies of this excellent literary magazine but modern technology also allows me to download a digital copy of the magazine in addition to the paper and ink copy. As I run out of shelf space I am seriously considering donating the paper copies and just archiving the digital editions that are available. But I’m not there yet …
A Celebration of Reading 