Good morning, friends. I hope the week has been good to you.

Here's what we've been up to this week (or, in this case, what we will be up to next week because I'm scheduling this — scheduled this? — a full week ago because I have by now been away from my computer for several days, leading a group of students on a study abroad excursion then — now? — having the weekend off before our next class session):

Past contributor D.W. White returned with a review of Absence by Issa Quincy (Two Dollar Radio).

And our summer flash fiction series continued with "When Cain Spoke to Abel in the Field" by Kevin Grauke .

Then we were excited to have past contributor of book reviews Aram Mrjoian share some research notes about his recent novel Waterline (HarperVia).  

Submissions to be read by guest editor Nicholas Claro close later today, so if there's a story you've been meaning to send him, now is the time.

If the week has gone as expected for me, this newsletter is being emailed to you while I'm exploring Trieste, a city I have long, long wanted to visit because of what other writers — Jan Morris, Bruce Chatwin, more lately Nick Hunt — have written about it. Who could resist an invitation like this one, from Morris?

Many exiles, of course, are given no choice, but I imagine most of us sometimes tire of living in the open, where everything is plain to see and we ourselves are obvious, and for anyone with this sporadic impulse to withdraw into somewhere less transparent, Trieste offers a compelling destination—surreptitious itself, and ambiguous.

I have long had a notion — the way you might have an inkling that a book you haven't read yet could be a special one for you — that if I went to Trieste something would happen, so here's hoping it has. Ask me next week, I suppose.

Thanks for reading,

Steve Himmer