Julia Pike

Lukas and Elsa

May 1, 2013 Fiction, Issue 05, Issue 05 Fiction

1.

Søren sat on his stoop rasping his hands together, listening to his sister Elsa shouting inside the house. She had been coming home late, and Søren’s father was finally speaking up. Lukas Clemens’s Mustang—a rebuilt black muscle car whose engine Lukas had somehow replaced with a stock-car Hemi—stood idling in the driveway, its headlights casting long shadows behind the tilted stakes of their mother’s abandoned garden. Søren thought he could hear Lukas and Elsa laughing. Just as he’d decided he should go in and help, the door swung open, and the two of them barged out. Lukas patted Søren on the head and said, “Later, buddy.” Elsa pinched his ear and twisted it, then ran through the snow saying, “Don’t wait up!” The Mustang roared and carried her away.

High Heels

May 1, 2013 Fiction, Issue 05, Issue 05 Fiction

By TERESE SVOBODA

There’s smoke and there’s children burning their fingers on  the cashews they pluck from the fire.

The boatman wants us to hire him, says the Swahili-speaker among us, but first this boatman is searching for wood for a new tiller. The Swahili-speaker also says not to try for the cashews in the fire ourselves. Papayas will fall, we’ll whack them down with sticks, he says. Let the children have the nuts.

Ode to my Father

May 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Poetry, Poetry

By DENISE DUHAMEL

Man who gave all the benefit of the doubt,
man of beer and doughnuts, man of wieners and maple syrup,
sweet-toothed man, man of the one-liner,

Race Fever

May 1, 2013 Fiction, Issue 05, Issue 05 Fiction

By AMY BRILL

Joseluís is earlier than he needs to be. The Tur Boliviano office is empty and dark, hot and dry, like the streets outside. The hard plastic chairs smell of sweat, dust, spit, the accumulated filth of thousands of backpacks dragged through hundreds of cities and towns, through airports and rail stations and other places he has never seen. Leaning back and closing his eyes, he imagines the dirt of Paris, the scum of Buenos Aires, and smiles to himself. Gracias a Dios, he mutters, repeating the last line of the speech he has memorized, the speech he will deliver later, when he has roared across the finish line. Gracias al GMC. Gracias a ustedes.

Justice

May 1, 2013 Fiction, Issue 05, Issue 05 Fiction

By LEE JOHNSON

The ratchet strap unlocked its front door, and Jack the Uncle and I made our way into the air-conditioned barroom, took our stools. We mopped our faces with napkins from the rail and left them crumpled there in front of us. Skip was in the kitchen taking his time checking keg levels. “I need one now,” Jack the Uncle said. He twisted his fingers together and held back the shakes. “All this waiting around,” he said, “it ain’t right.”

“Open Air”

April 26, 2013 Studio

Artist: RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER
Curated by JULIA COOKE

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, “Open Air, Relational Architecture”, 2012. Commissioned by the Association for Public Art, Philad

Twenty-four searchlights, all high-powered, were set on rooftops around Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway last September and October. They were programmed, however, to avoid shining their spotlights on any physical objects: no buildings, no naked windows, no trees. Instead, they glimmered straight up into the sky: twenty-four columns of light responding — here solid, there faint, twitching and beating and sweeping across the sky together, then separating — to the voices of Philadelphia residents.

April 2013

April 23, 2013 Poetry

New poems from our print contributors in the U.S. and abroad.

Manoa Lo’i

April 5, 2013 Studio

By STEVE BULL

New media artist Steve Bull creates augmented reality installations by adding three-dimensional graphics and sound via global positioning satellites onto real life places. The result can only be seen through a free Junaio browser downloaded to smartphones or tablets. Using the browser as a window, the viewer wanders through the augmented reality construct in any direction. Touching the object, the viewer can hear an associated audio recording. The browser can also be used to capture a still image of this combined world of the virtual and real.

The Four Times of Day by William Hogarth

April 1, 2013 Issue 05, Issue 05 Art

By AMY SANDE-FRIEDMAN

William Hogarth (1697–1764), the eighteenth-century English artist known for his satirical views of contemporary life, first published The Four Times of Day engravings in 1738, based on paintings completed two years earlier. Although some of Hogarth’s other series profess a moral, the intent of these works was to portray humorous caricatures of contemporary  figures. The images are rich in detail, providing a glimpse into the world of 1730s London.

On the Near-Future Novelist: Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich

March 29, 2013 Essays

By SCOTT GEIGER

In two sequential hurricane seasons, the Earth has mounted two solid runs at (re)producing the plot of Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow. It’s good Rich’s second novel found print this spring. After Irene and Sandy, there’s this spooky feeling that it’s only a matter of time before greater disaster strikes.

Julia Pike

jpike19

Lukas and Elsa

High Heels

Ode to my Father

Race Fever

Justice

“Open Air”

April 2013

Manoa Lo’i

The Four Times of Day by William Hogarth

On the Near-Future Novelist: Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich

Discover the extraordinary in The Common.