Book Review: Michael Kimball’s Big Ray

You know you ought to look away. The Brahma bull is jack-knifing like a crazed 18-wheeler. Any moment now, it will throw the rider up into the air like just another clod of dirt. Then as he lies flat on his back, trying to remember how to breathe, it will bear down on him with […]

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Lady Chatterley, My Father and Me

In 1928, when the English author DH Lawrence had Lady Chatterley’s Lover privately printed in Italy and Alfred A. Knopf published a heavily censored abridgement of the novel in the United States, my father was a 21-year-old undergraduate studying philosophy and theology at the University of Latvia. In 1930, when Lawrence died at age 44 and US Senator Bronson M Cutting […]

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Dear Elvira: Regarding [Literary] Diets and Cats

Before we bid adieu to audacity (the theme of our Summer 2012 issue) and begin to entertain doubt (the theme of our Winter 2013 issue), I’ve slipped in something any literary review of repute requires: an advice column, complete with a fictional columnist. So without further ado, allow me to introduce Elvira Rivers, whose brief […]

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Our Memorable Audacity Issue

Audacity and I had a test of wills a few weeks ago. On a whim, I’d signed up my teenaged son, my brother–eight years my junior–and myself for a mud run. We had eight weeks to train for the run, my first 5K, but there was no way to prepare for the obstacles: walls, nets, […]

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