On May 8th, MR and Amherst Books hosted our 2025 Anne Halley Poetry Prize winner Chard deNiord for a reading.
IN 1964, A SHORT STORY titled “Mississippi Ham Rider” appeared in the summer issue of the Massachusetts Review. Authored by a young writer named Toni Cade, the story follows Inez Williams, a copywriter who has traveled south to interview an old blues singer named Ham Rider. She has also been charged with . . .
In Issa Quincy’s debut novel, Absence, the unnamed narrator mythologizes a series of figuresthat he directly or indirectly encounters, including a disgraced teacher and the student he seduced and forever changed; a lonely bus driver in Boston; a disabled landlord who mourns the lesbian aunt his family abandoned; and other strangely compelling . . .
The bubbles of my words amuse him.He pokes them with a forward tentacleas they rise from my mouth. Biggerbubbles for longer words. I can feeland see rather than hear his giggling.See: yes. A tittering of the body,a gelatinous shake which assures mehe still likes me.—from Benjamin S. Grossberg’s “My Octopus Lover Is Easy . . .
You must be very tallto love the dark. You needsturdy legs and a heartthat struggles just enoughto bring your blood about themand raise it again to your head.You must feel in your chestthe finite days of its function.—from Dan Rosenberg’s “To Love the Dark,” Volume 66, Issue 2 (Summer 2025) Tell us . . .
ALAN GROSTEPHAN is the author of The Banana Wars and Bogotá, a novel chosen by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best ten books of fiction in 2013 and longlisted for the Pen/Robert W. Bingham Prize. He is also the editor and translator of Stories of Life and Death, a collection of writing by emerging Colombian writers.
