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 […]

In fiction, we like to watch people work their way through difficult situations, and so writers create interesting characters—sometimes likeable, sometimes not, sometimes a little of both—and place them in trying circumstances or, as others have described it, visit trouble upon them. It’s one thing, though, for people to struggle with each other in private, […]

Eight years ago, with encouragement and sponsorship from longtime supporters Steven Schwartz and Emily Hammond, Colorado Review established the Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction, in memory of Liza Nelligan, a Colorado State University alumna who became a gifted and beloved editor of literary fiction. The prize celebrates Liza’s life, her accomplishments, and her many contributions […]

Summer has always been for me the most reflective of seasons—a period of downtime, a quiet and sometimes purposefully lazy stretch that allows us to consider (and reconsider) what looms so large the rest of the year and to imagine, perhaps, letting go of attachments that are no longer serving us and figuring out how […]

One of the many pleasures of putting a magazine together is the tendency for themes to emerge entirely unbidden. Though unplanned, this could have been a special issue called “The Parent Gap.” The fiction and nonfiction pieces gathered here all touch on the ways in which we spend our lives trying to connect (and disconnect) […]

Now in its seventh year, the Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction gives us cause for bittersweet celebration; established in memory of Liza Nelligan—a classmate, student, teacher, colleague, and friend of many here in the English Department at Colorado State—it reminds us of our loss. But by honoring her passion for literary fiction through this prize, […]