What we've been up to

New Web Feature: There was a time, not very long ago—before the adjunctification of the creative professions—when making it as a professional writer or journalist didn't seem so preposterous. With a little luck and hard work, even freelancing might pay the bills. That was a time when writer James Conaway was getting his start and, gig by gig, he went from San Francisco to Palo Alto to New Orleans and learned to write along the way. He recalls his experience as a fledgling writer and describes the world he saw in 1960s in "Starting Out."

"There are no window boxes in front of the dilapidated mansion that houses us and an indeterminate number of others in 1965. Our bedroom, once the maid's, is now full of ravaged antiques deserted by the owner when she fled to the Peninsula. Students, aspiring artists, and hippies come and go like extras in a period drama while I sit over my Remington portable in the kitchen, looking from the keys to the cracked white enamel handles on the ancient stove to cats cavorting on the wall outside. I am trying to write fiction while keeping the furnace going in the basement for a reduction in rent, and Penny is working for real money at Pacific Bell on the other side of town."

New Web Feature: What makes a short story a short story? In this installment of our online series, Critical Miniatures, Wheaton College English professor Richard Hughes Gibson offers an answer with "The Art of Compression." But he also raises another question: What can a short story do that other kinds of fiction can't? Gibson looks for answers in the works of Yasunari Kawabata and Lydia Davis.

"What exactly separates the short story from the novel? As the contemporary Scottish writer William Boyd has observed, the issue is more complicated than it might at first appear. Novelists and short story writers, Boyd points out, rely on the same 'literary tools,' including character, plot, setting, title, and dialogue, and their outputs—sentences and paragraphs—look the same on the page. The tempting answer is to fall back on the obvious difference: short stories are just shorter than novels."

Our summer issue is coming soon. The theme is "Theological Variations," and it includes contributions from Alan Jacobs, John Milbank, Charlie Riggs, and Antón Barba-Kay—as well as other essays from Matt Crawford, Rita Koganzon, Talbot Brewer, Jonathan Malesic, Martha Bayles and many, many others.

Look for the summer issue next month—and subscribe and please tell your friends.

While you wait, remember that the spring issue is available for free at our website—but only for a few more weeks.

Recommended Reading

From the archives: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is arguably one of the most misunderstood novels of the twentieth century. That is because many readers have been tempted to think of it as a love story—an unnerving and disturbing one, yes, but still a story about a failed and one-sided yet nevertheless erotic relationship between a grown man and a young girl. In "Anything But True Love" for the fall 2021 issue, University of Virginia philosopher and Institute faculty fellow Talbot Brewer argued that to call Lolita a love story is to misunderstand one of the fundamental characteristics of true love: the desire for the good and the growth of another person.

"If genuine love provides us with the clearest appreciation available to us of the inviolability of the other, hence of what is impermissible and why, and if Humbert Humbert's love for Lolita is genuine, then even the clearest appreciation of the inviolability of others does not include an appreciation of the vileness of the serial rape of a child. But if the serial rape of a child is not beyond the pale, then nothing is. God may as well be dead, the good unreal, because everything is permitted."