Issue [1]
How the Japanese took over America(n amusement). An electrifying listening experience at the Vienna Konzerthaus. The Day Dad Brought Home a Lion. A Novel Obsession. Notes by Trevor and Francine. When Tom met James. I am my Mother’s Daughter. Reflections on an Italian Escapade.
The Lion of 81 Upper Orange Street
By Rose Saltman
I was about four years old when my father announced that he was bringing a lion cub home for a day, a special arrangement he had made with a patient who was a keeper at the Groote Schuur Zoo. The cub was three months old and had been abandoned by his mother. I was thrilled with the lion, a novel distraction from our workaday pets and the occasional angulate tortoise that wandered into the garden. He was endearing and playful in the way that domestic kittens can be, and any menace that his outsized paws and claws may have conveyed was subsumed into my father’s behaviour: if it was good enough for Dad to handle the cub, then it was alright for me to approach him. Less enthusiastic about the new visitor were my mother and the family cat, Blackie, who disappeared the instant he saw the lion.
My Time in Alabama
By Tom Wade
My final destination was Forest Home, Alabama, the headquarters of the Gulfcoast Pulpwood Association. I had learned about this organization from Harry, a former colleague I had served with in VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) for a year in Georgia. When he left, he volunteered with the GPA, an organization aiming to unionize pulpwood cutters, some of the South’s most destitute workers.
Mother
By Winifred Òdúnóku
Mother had two elder step brothers. She is the second born for her mother, and the eldest daughter. I have two elder step siblings, my twin brother and I are Mother's second born, and I am her only daughter. I hate to imagine the similarity between Mother's family when she was growing up, and the family I was also born into. I hate to imagine the possibility of leading a marital life similar to Mother's, or Mother's mother. It haunts me every time I think about it.
Mine Ears Have Heard the Glory
By Thomas Larson
It took listening into my seventh decade —as a musician and a critic, my life’s crossover passions, —to arrive at the purest listening experience of classical music I have ever had; live in a concert venue highlights from Sergei Prokofiev’s Suite from Romeo and Juliet (1938) and, in full, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony (1937), performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and led by the Czech conductor, Jakub Hrůša, at the Konzerthaus in Vienna.
The Poetry of Owning Books
By Dian Parker
I own so many books that my husband has to keep building more bookshelves. My problem is that I need to have the physical book. Not a library book or a virtual book. Reading online causes me to skim and skip ruthlessly. There’s just so much information every day piling up in my inbox, outbox, out of town box, trash box, brain box. I want the book in hand, hard or soft cover, it doesn’t matter as long as it is mine. I own it.
Insert Coin(s) Here: The History of the American Arcade
When the novelty inevitably wore off, owners repurposed their establishments with lower-priced attractions for a broader crowd. Workers and tourists would now spend their pennies on coin-operated shooting galleries, peep shows, fortune tellers, strength testers, candy dispensers, and even slot machines. These establishments were noted for the visible arches supporting their roofs and the recessed arches for their attractions, hence the name: “arcade.”
By J.D. Harlock
By L. A. Ballesteros Gentile
Here’s the difficulty of creative nonfiction: you have to convey not just the facts of memory but its color too, and in this recreation—using language—you must choose which colors to emphasize, which facts to share, so no matter how hard you try, you always end up writing about something that only ever sort of happened and are thus left with a work that is only ever a kind of nonfiction, in the same way memories only ever seem to be real, even if years later they make us cry, make us shiver.
By Matias Travieso-Diaz and Francine G. Rosenfeld (deceased)
This should be one of the most joyful days of my life, and it would be so if I could find a way to drive to Tomsk. I am a flying phobic and even though I am on my way to adopt a lovely daughter I am too anxious about the plane ride to fully enjoy the moment. Nastya is awaiting us in Boarding School # 6, an orphanage in Tomsk. We can’t wait to see her.
