Our July 8 issue just went live, and it happens to be our annual Fiction issue. In addition to Anthony Domestico’s interview with C. E. Morgan, which we posted in May, here are some highlights.

First, we have a short story by Valerie Sayers about love, illness, art, and time. Here’s a peek:

“Once upon a middle-aged time, reader, Diego O’Dowd and I lived together in an artists’ co-op I’d founded back in the days when artists in downtown Manhattan bought decrepit lofts, unsafe at any price, with money they begged from respectable relatives.”

Read all of “Company” here.

Then, Edward T. Wheeler reviews Andrew O’Hagan’s novel The Illuminations, a meditation on fractured memory and familial connection. Wheeler praises O’Hagan’s flexibility between narrative voices that eventually weave together as the characters do. He writes:

“O’Hagan takes on our fear of the blank of demented senescence. In Anne we see what a visitor to any loved one in a nursing home witnesses—the pieces of a former whole, the furtive self-glimpses of a mind confused by its own reflection. There is dignity in that faltering consciousness. O’Hagan offers a conditional hope mediated by the memory of a life lived before.”

Read the whole review here.

Finally, Paul Lakeland reviews Katie Roiphe’s The Violet Hour, her new book on six writers reckoning with death and mortality. While Roiphe offers many insights in her authors, particularly James Salter, she falters when she brings herself into the story. Lakeland asks:

“Is this principally a researched work of literary journalism, or a memoir? The author’s serious illnesses in early life may help her get close to death in the lives on which she is focused. Yet her obsession with death is less compelling to us than it is to her, and that’s a problem.”

Read the whole review here.

Make sure you check out the full table of contents here, and if you need to catch up on back issues, you can find them all here.

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