Good morning, friends.

I am — I hope — somewhere above the Atlantic Ocean at the moment you receive this, en route from Amsterdam to Boston after concluding the study abroad program I've been teaching. I was privileged to spend much of the summer with a talented, generous, and energized group of students, traveling and writing about that travel and sharing that writing for discussion and revision. It's a difficult and complicated time in the world in so many ways and for so many people, and not I'm so naive to think those problems can be solved as easily as just being kind to and interested in one another, and yet: When I'm traveling and meeting new people in new-to-me places, when I'm excited by the energy and curiosity of young writers and artists, when I'm overwhelmed in the very best way by the new books and stories and poems being constantly published and adding to my long insurmountable to be read pile, all those writers committed enough to create something and make it available to the rest of us, to reveal themselves to us… I suppose I  do feel like there's something in the idea of just being kind to and interested in one another. It's not a bad place to start, anyway.

Anyway, be glad you can skip to the next part of this newsletter and aren't stuck listening to me talk about this on a long flight today.

Here's what we've been up to this week:

Robert Long Foreman reviewed Closer by Miriam Gershow (Regal House). Robert previously wrote about The Sea Gives Up The Dead by Molly Olguín, and we're glad to have him return to our pages.

And our summer flash fiction series continued with "Pink Suit" by Nia Crawford, published by us for the first time.

Then in research notes Anna Bruno wrote about her novel Fine Young People (Algonquin Books).

Elsewhere, contributor Jessica Francis Kane's novel Fonseca is forthcoming very soon from Penguin Press. And Woman of the Hour by Claire Polders has just been published by Vine Leaves Press; we'll have more for you about Claire's collection in a couple of weeks. Finally, Hannah Grieco is a writer we've never actually published but whose work we've enjoyed and whose presence in the literary community we're grateful for, and her collection First Kicking, Then Not is about to be available from Stanchion.

Thanks for reading,

Steve Himmer