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 . . .
Where it’s fall not winter spring not summer cool not cold –Chris Thile As we turn from the warmth to the cool-ness of autumnal days, from our Köl-sches and pilsners and lightIPAs, try this flightOf white Belgians. Delight In their mellowness, variant glowsThat their bright cloudiness can bestow.Equinoctial weatherBrings flavors togetherTo pause . . .
Gimena recognized two things. One: her neighbors meant no real harm, that they were merely bored, and an element of drama, no matter how false, was too juicy to deny; and two: she would turn into an ugly, bitter, unrecognizable version of herself if she stayed amongst them. —from J. Nevada’s “What . . .
Happy scenes made me perfectly bitter that autumn. The season dragged on instead of running its course, looping back in a closed curve. Instead of moving from spring to summer to autumn, it was autumn, autumn, and autumn again. Would winter ever arrive? —from “Autumn Heatwave” by Park Seon Woo, translated by . . .
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.
