Images of a globe threatened by fragmentation and engulfment from Theo Wujcik’s “Global Warming” series of paintings set the tone of concern for world stability and the validation of human connectedness expressed by many of the visual and literary artists in this issue. Like the cubist painters of the last century, Wujcik perceives a world simultaneously whole and pixellated. How do such discreet bits, fixed edges, angles, boundaries, and curves ever coalesce? We are given an unflinching look at the discontinuities between the circle of life and a disintegrating culture. And we are called to respond.
In our second-ever double-issue, TR 33/34 debuts the winning short story from our new, annual $1,000 Danahy Fiction Prize, "The Trader Thief" by Douglas Danoff of New York City. Other contributors include writers and artists from around the world, from Hanneke Beaumont of the Netherlands to Samrat Upadhyay, a native of Nepal. There are new stories by Mark Baumgartner, Karen Brown, Ed Skoog, and Christopher Torockio; poems by Ron De Maris, D. R. Goodman, Daniel Rifenburgh, Earl S. Braggs, Jeff Gundy, Steve Kowit, and Elaine Terranova; nonfiction by J. Malcolm Garcia, Joan Cusack Handler, Debra Gwartney; a tribute to Mary McCarthy by Leila Philip, Phillip Lopate, and S. L. Wisenberg; and much more.
