Tag: Tin House

The Final Issue Is Big and Fat and Full of Goodies

TH80-Cover-800x1029Some time around the Y2K scramble my daughter gifted me with a copy of Tin House Magazine: Issue 11 if I recall. Since then I have acquired and buried one wife, experienced one pesky stroke, gained a son-in-law and two delightful grand-children, read a few books, received social security, surrendered my driver’s license, and moved to northern Florida (certainly apostacy for a Southern California boy).

I filled in those earlier issues of Tin House and have several shelves next to my bed dedicated to all twenty years of the publication.

Sad to see it go.

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Spring Fling

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”

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The End

220px-Tin_House.jpgI have an interesting track record with literary publications … they keep disappearing, often just after I renew my subscription. Unfortunately, in this case it is one of my very favorites.  Tin House has accompanied me through many years of excellent reading.

I will miss it.

Dear Tin House Reader,

Tin House’s 20th Anniversary Issue, to be published in June 2019, will be the publication’s last. I’m grateful to Rob Spillman, Elissa Schappell, and Holly MacArthur, and the entire magazine staff, current and past, for their part in creating a vital, versatile outlet, and hosting important literary and cultural conversations over the past twenty years. It has been a remarkable run.

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Tin House Is Poison

Tin House Volume 20, Number 1: Poison

TH77-Cover-800x1030One night after I’d turned off my reading light but not yet sunk into sleep, an uneasy feeling swept up my back. I was accustomed to the sweep of shadows along the walls as the train emptied its passengers and they marched by my windows and cars braked at the corner stoplight, but one shadow had stopped, its source blocking the stripe of light at the corner of my closest window.

‘Hey, baby’ a voice murmured from outside. ‘Are you sleeping?
—MELISSA FEBOS, Intrusions“

Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.” So said Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century Swiss physician credited with creating laudanum. In our toxic times, it seems as if there are very few remedies and that all is, indeed, poisonous. What, then, must writers do? Come up with remedies? Use the poison to cleanse, to heal, or simply to attack what is attacking us?

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