This Review was written by Billy Hallal and was featured in The Southeast Review Vol. 31.2. Jess Walter. We Live in Water: Stories. HarperCollins Publishers, 2013. $14.99. While searching for his small-time crook father in a newly gentrified North Idaho town, Michael Dessens has a realization about the destruction he has wrought on his own life: “A hole opened up and he had to know what was inside it. So he picked and picked until the hole was huge and then everything sort of

It goes without saying there are a lot of factors that go into how a literary journal selects work for publication. As the assistant managing editor at TriQuarterly, I’ve found even genre editors at the same magazine have dramatically different decision-making processes. The discussions I have with our fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and video teams are all nuanced in esoteric ways. With this series of round tables, I wanted to compile various editorial perspectives to give writ

Considering My Disallowance I lived. An absurdity. My body rose to stir in response to starshine, so much of me requiring its fire. Within this one freckle of world, everything and I vibrated with need. The table-tapping pas de deux of houseflies. The bumblebee’s examining the redbud’s rash anxieties. A rusty ant harvested the green grass blade. The single cardinal started, started, blessing. My bladder trembled when the earth called water back into its circuits. So

Born in New Orleans and raised in Hawaii, poet Barbara Hamby earned an MA at Florida State University. She is the author of several poetry collections, including On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014); All-Night Lingo Tango (2009); Babel (2004), which won the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ Donald Hall Prize; and Delirium (1995), which won the Vassar Miller Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber

Robert Olen Butler has published seventeen novels—The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, Hell, A Small Hotel, The Hot Country, The Star of Istanbul, The Empire of Night, Perfume River, Paris in the Dark—and six volumes of short fiction—Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, Weegee Stories, and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 199