Loss isn’t generally isn’t what comes to mind when we think of summer. And yet, this issue’s stories and essays are situated in mourning and letting go. In Lissa Franz’s “MonkeyMonkeyGirl,” a child’s decades-ago disappearance still haunts her sisters and mother. During the pandemic, in Janice Deal’s “BAE,” a couple’s college-aged daughter slips ever further away from them as she chooses to live among an enigmatic religious community. A woman and her overly critical father attend an academic conference together and find an unexpected opportunity for détente in Meghan Louise Wagner’s “Thought Experiments.” In Yvette DeChavez’s “Two by Two,” a young married mother meets a couple who challenge her notions of faith, motherhood, and desire. Judith Cooper’s essay “Heart Dissolving, Skin Marinating” is a fever dream account of her experience with a rare cancer, a stream of consciousness weave of clichés, word associations, and gallows humor. Aaron Kang Smithson meditates movingly on architecture, anemoia, and the loss of his father in “Palimpsest.” And in “Down and Out in Disneyland,” Maya Bernstein-Schalet considers the connections between escapism and addiction as she tries to make sense of her beloved cousin’s death.

“Everything I didn’t tell her felt like something I needed in order to construct a place I could live all by myself, high off the ground,” the narrator of Becky Hagenston’s “Voluntary” recalls of a visit to a hospitalized high school friend many years earlier. Grasping at a sense of control amid her friend’s eating […]

Technically it’s fall here in Colorado as I write this introduction, but on this late September afternoon, 84 degrees and rather toasty in CR’s attic-floor office in Tiley House, it still feels like summer, and the semester still feels new and full of promise. But it will be mid-November when this issue is printed and […]

“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 […]

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 […]