Winter 2008 Issue Accolades

We hate to love to brag¹, but people are saying all sorts of nice things about our Winter 2008 issue.

Peter Carlson has a very kind review of our latest issue on the front page of the Style section in today’s Washington Post. Carlson particularly enjoyed David Morris’ “Trophy Town,” about Ramadi’s sudden turnaround, and Malcom Garcia’s “All the Country Will Be Shaking,” about his return to Afghanistan to track down the six war orphans he’d left behind three years before. Carlson’s best moment in the article is also his least complimentary one, describing our Botero portfolio:

There’s also a selection of the controversial Abu Ghraib paintings by the famous Colombian artist Fernando Botero, which you’ll love if you’re the kind of person who enjoys pictures of fat, naked men being tortured. I’m not, but, hey, you can’t please everybody.

Last week the Wall Street Journal’s Robin Moroney recommended Garcia’s “All the Country Will Be Shaking,” too, in the paper’s “Informed Reader” column.

Talk of the Nation’s David Gura plugs Neil Shea’s “Ramadi Nights” over on Blog of the Nation, praising the “riveting read” for providing engaging reportage that dares use the nominative singular pronoun. Incidentally, this piece came to us via our submission system, totally unsolicited, which is unusual for reporting like this. It was a delightful break from our standard fare of me-moirs, as our jaded nonfiction reader refers to the never ending series of autobiographical submissions that are every bit as bad as Rob Kunzig says they are.

Our fiction is getting some lovin’, too. Patrick Rapa is all about Alejandro Zambra’s “Bonsai” and Drew Johnson’s “The Last Dead”.

If you want to stay ahead of the hipness curve, check out Daniel Heyman’s “Art Born of the Need to Tell.” It hasn’t yet gotten the buzz that it inevitably will, so if you check it out now, you can claim to be utterly bored with it by the time your aunt forwards you the link in a few weeks.

1. Dizzy Dean being our philosopher of choice around here these days.