“I’d lost the skill. I’d lost the touch,” laments Sid, the narrator of Amy Silverberg’s “Poker Night.” Still reeling from the fallout of an ill-advised relationship, Sid has lost so much more: her career, her reputation, and her confidence, not to mention a fifty-dollar hand. This issue’s stories and essays are rife with loss. In […]
Though “The Age of Anxiety” was Auden’s description for the unsettled mood of the mid-twentieth century, surely every era has a legitimate claim to the term. In early 2024, we find ourselves in undeniably precarious times—world unrest, a changing climate, threats to our democracy—and many of us are looking for meaningful ways to express our […]
In “Reconsidering the Sunflowers,” Stephanie Harrison recalls her father’s habit of painting just one side of their family’s house a different color each year and the moment she saw this through fresh eyes: “Something in me had blinked and refocused. It was like the optical illusion I’d marveled over in fifth grade: beautiful woman or […]
“I liked scanning the sky, looking for signals,” says the narrator of Kelly Luce’s “The Ugliest Girl at Marcy’s Wedding Pavilion.” “Even when nothing happened, there was still that heartbeat. It was a space—it was space—where I could process what was happening in my life.” We’re all probably looking and listening for signals most of […]
“Whatever plans you think you got, you better get some others.” An ominous bit of advice given, in Brendan McKennedy’s “Deep River,” to a young woman struggling to make a meaningful life as a millhand in 1920s North Carolina, it might well be the motto for the last three years, when we’ve had to pivot, […]
Longtime readers of Colorado Review have come to know the fall issue for featuring the winning story from the Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction. We are so pleased to showcase this year’s winner, Mike Murray’s “Night Owls,” selected by final judge Ramona Ausubel. Of this story, Ausubel writes: “ ‘Night Owls’ takes place in the darkness—characters […]
As we make our way toward summer, our calendars begin to fill in anticipation of those longer days, those warmer nights: some of us braving travel again, some of us staying closer to home. Whether near or afar, we’ll likely spend more time with friends and family, though after more than two years of a […]
As we approach the third year of the pandemic—an ongoing interruption, suspension, cessation—some of us have been struggling a bit with our sense of time: Did we do that last year or was it the year before . . . The months seem to flow one into the next, often without the usual demarcations of […]
Among the many pleasures of this season is featuring the winning story from our annual Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction. Now in its eighteenth year, the prize was established in honor of Liza Nelligan, a writer, scholar, literary editor, and alumna of Colorado State University’s English Department. This year, that story is Danny Thiemann’s “One […]
It’s mid-May here as I wrap up this issue, and the snow from a not-unusual-for-Colorado storm just a few days ago is melting, giving way to something that bears some resemblance to spring, though I feel I hardly recognize it. For so many of us everywhere, this is a time when the familiar has been […]