It’s out: Tin House VOLUME 20, Number 3: Spring Fling
Over the past month, Valentina had attempted every procedure, from reputable to highly experimental. She’d bathed Lenin’s body in hydrogen peroxide and potassium acetate, employed benzene wipes, adjusted the dosages of intravenous polymer, applied refined paraffin wax in a thin layer over the face to maintain the appearance of skin, even resorted to botulinum. But the corpse had ceased all cooperation. After seventy years of successful maintenance, Lenin’s body was deteriorating faster than the morticians and biochemical scientists could keep up. Patchy dark spots bloomed across the dome of Lenin’s skull. His eye sockets collapsed like sinkholes. That morning, as Valentina inspected a gray fleshy protrusion on his temple, his left ear had fallen off into her hand like the handle on a poorly made clay mug. Most worryingly, there was a new smell about him. A damp, ghoulish, subterranean stench.
—MARIA LIOUTAIA, “Preservation”
As when you experience spring, when you read great writing you can feel as if there are powerful, unseen forces just below the surface. You can feel their pull, and you probably have a very strong sense of what they look and feel like. Sometimes it helps to have someone help you see and name them. Let our writers be your guide in this time of renewal and regeneration. Happy, or at least thought-provoking, spring.
Featuring:
Fiction from Jo Ann Beard, Maria Lioutaia, Aleksandar Hemon, Xavier Navarro Aquino, Katie Arnold-Ratliff, and Robert Travieso
Poetry from Jericho Brown, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Laetitia Burns, Mai Der Vang, Lily Zhou, Airea D. Matthews, Lip Manegio, Suji Kwock Kim, Yvonne Amey, Gabriel Fried, Christian Barter, Keetje Kuipers, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Zehra Naqvi, C. Dale Young, Brendan Constantine, Andrea Cohen, Seth Amos, Sarah Giragosian, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Toi Derricotte, Yanyi, and Donald Platt
Nonfiction from Amy Lam, John Freeman, and Alia Volz
Books Lost & Found from Alyssa Knickerbocker, Tana Wojczuk, Kavita Das, and Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
A Celebration of Reading 