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 […]
It’s easy to get a little lazy during the summer, settling deeply into that poolside chaise longue, umbrella drink within easy reach, scent of coconut in the air. And why shouldn’t you? You’ve earned it, this “weekend” of the year: June, July, and August standing in for an extended Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. But don’t […]
It’s a little like saying you don’t like apple pie or puppies or brown paper packages tied up with strings, but I don’t really care for springtime in the Rockies. It’s too unpredictable, too capricious. One gloriously sunny day you think you’ll pack away your heavy coat, gloves, and sweaters; the next day you’re scraping three inches of snow from your windshield, the eager bulbs that emerged just days before now frostbitten and chagrined by their early arrival.
With every fall/winter issue, we have the sincere pleasure of featuring the winner of the Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction. This year marks the prize’s tenth anniversary—a bittersweet note, as it has given us both a venue to showcase outstanding fiction writing and a way to honor the memory of an alumna and friend, Liza […]
Even though I’ve been anticipating its return ever since late September, I find that I must still re-orient myself to summer, or rather to my world in summer. The vibrant light of the longer days, the heat, and the change in pace sometimes render the familiar slightly strange. The stories and essays of this issue […]
It seems fitting that, as we enter our fortieth volume year (we are really fifty-seven, having been launched in 1956, but who’s counting?), the stories and essays featured in this issue are all situated in youth. For the narrator of Thomas Cain’s “Stop,” an abandoned house serves as the locus of adolescent uncertainty, romantic experimentation, […]
Our fall issue is always a privilege to present to our readers because it features the winner of the Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction. Now in its ninth year, this contest was established to honor the memory of writer and literary editor Liza Nelligan, an alumna of and friend to many here at Colorado State […]
There’s no denying a certain fascination with the extreme—stories of grand-scale fortune, loss, celebrity, infamy, adventure, depravity, and redemption. But often the more resonant stories reside not in the extreme, but between its polarities, or at its threshold. Carole Firstman’s “Liminal Scorpions” articulates the thread of in-betweenness running through this issue’s essays and stories: liminality […]