Sleights of Hand

It’s coming soon: Conjunctions 65, Sleights of Hand: The Deception Issue.

Here is what Bradford Morrow, the editor of Conjunctions, has to say about this issue:

People of every age and stripe dissimulate, bluff, and beguile, whether in order to harm or protect. The writer, the artist, the magician, the thief—deceivers all. Animals, too, are masters of deceit. Even the orchid employs a wonderfully varied arsenal of pollinator deceptions, luring bees and wasps with a false promise of nourishment or sex. And consider Marina Tsvetaeva, who appropriated from Pushkin the observation that “a deception that elevates us is dearer than a legion of low truths,” thus complicating the subject entirely. This special issue of Conjunctions gathers a wide spectrum of essays, fiction, and poetry on the classic subject of deception, exploring a world in which truth is a most fragile, elaborate, and mercurial thing. Continue reading “Sleights of Hand” →

Conjunctions 62: Exile

Spring 2014

Edited by Bradford Morrow

Few subjects are as rich, complex, and profound as exile. This is especially true if one allows its definition to venture beyond the political, religious, or cultural, so that it embraces the deeply personal, psychological, and emotional terrains in which individuals inhabit a place of self-exile, or even exile from sanity and surety.

From Africa to China, Pakistan to the Philippines, to locales that are not to be found on any map, this issue interrogates exile as both a literal expulsion or ostracism and, as Primo Levi has it, “the prevalence of the unreal over the real.”

Continue reading “Conjunctions 62: Exile” →