Every fall, we have the true pleasure of publishing the winning story of the Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction. This year, it’s Katie M. Flynn’s “Island Rule,” in which an environmental biology professor is haunted by memories of the surreally accelerated evolution and ensuing political violence that expelled her, as a child, from her island […]
It’s something we almost all lament at some point in adulthood: how ephemeral summer seems compared to its endless stretch when we were young. Now, before May even ends, the calendar fills with summer plans and obligations until September arrives, the season fleeting, diminishing, disappearing in the rearview almost as quickly as it appeared on […]
How can a thing that is, essentially, nothing—a space where something else should be—have such pull?” asks Emily Sinclair in “Searching for the Duck Hole,” featured in this issue’s nonfiction. It’s a question that resonates throughout the stories and essays in these pages—characters and writers alike bump along and against the walls of estrangement, investigating […]
We prepare this issue for the printer just as summer slips through our grasp, giving way to fall, the season that requires us to let go, to give up, to give in. We put away the things of sultry afternoons and glorious, sun-stretched evenings, begin to prepare for the shorter days, the early frosts, the […]
Like New Year’s Eve, the onset of summer evokes plans and hopes, projects and promises. Often among them is the Summer Reading List. “This will be the summer,” we say, “when I read [insert major work you’re ashamed to admit you’ve never read].” But we might not necessarily start that list on June 1. We’ll […]
Amid the myriad ways we can create community, connection, and companionship—from the virtual landscape of social media to the analog experience of cross-country family visits—we often find ourselves profoundly lonely. Some of us desire relationships yet, heartbreakingly, can’t negotiate the push and pull of proximity and distance. In this issue’s fiction, characters experience the paradox […]
Twelve years ago, with the support of Emily Hammond and Steven Schwartz, now Colorado Review’s fiction editor, we founded the Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction as a way to honor the memory of Liza Nelligan, a dear friend and Colorado State University English Department alumna. Nelligan passed away in 2003, and the Prize seeks to […]
With winter’s snow and spring’s chilly rain now long behind us, we can exhale and settle into summer, a time when the world outside, in all its verdant splendor and warmth, opens up again and invites us to engage with it: we open the windows, we eat outdoors, we may even sleep outdoors. The quintessential […]
Emerging from the grip of winter, when we’ve retreated from the cold, holing up in the warmth of our homes and for a time losing touch with the earth, with one another, sometimes even with ourselves, we long to reestablish ties once the green reveals itself again. The fiction and essays gathered here, in this […]
Since 2004, Colorado Review has proudly hosted the Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction, celebrating the memory of Liza Nelligan, an accomplished literary fiction editor and also an alumna of CR’s home, the English Department at Colorado State University. This year’s winner is Amira Pierce, whose story “Anything Good Is a Secret” was selected by Kent […]