After several years, I re-subscribed to Tin House. I thought it would inspire me to be more diligent in my reading, but I’m afraid it may make me fall farther behind, which is why I unsubscribed the first time. It just makes me feel better about myself to subscribe to a great literary magazine. Sometimes you just need those false and worldly self-esteem boosters. Anyway, here we go. The Winter issue is subtitled “Strong Coffee and a Good Read.” Most issues have a theme, but I think I am correct in saying this issue is theme-less. If I have missed it, please let me know.

The issue kicks off with “iff,” a short story by Antonya Nelson. She is considered a “master” of the form, but I’m not seeing it in this example. I found the narrator extremely annoying, and by the end of the story I thought, “No wonder your husband left you, your kid’s whipped by his girlfriend, and your mother-in-law is suicidal.” Moving on.

Michael Dickman’s poem “False Start” is one of my favorite pieces in this issue. Each of the five segments begin with the line, “At the end of one of the billion light years of loneliness…” With an opening line like that, the poem has to be great. The speaker addresses his mother, father, and brother. It begins with his mother in the kitchen feeding flies from her fingertips, but the imagery shifts to the ocean and restoration. I’m not sure what it all means, but I like it.

Karen Shepard’s “There Be Monsters” is a subtle dismantling of an wife and mother. She begins by telling us that when Natalie and her husband were dating, they joked about “deal breakers” in a marriage.

" Now Natalie thinks of the things that deserved to be deal breakers but that you let slip while you waited for further evidence, extenuating circumstances, explanations worthy of forgiveness. Things that now, twenty years down the road, are off-limits, unfair game. You took them off the table yourself. They sequestered themselves in their own little room, emerging for purposes of mockery and torment."

Natalie wishes her husband would do something unforgivable, something to let her out of her marriage. I felt for her at first, but as the story progresses, Shepard reveals that Natalie is not as together as she imagines. Towards the end, I didn’t like Natalie very much, but I got the feeling Natalie didn’t like Natalie very much. There is a moment of light at the end, but it’s hard to say if it is enough for the family.

Ben Marcus’ “The Moors” is the centerpiece of this issue. Editor Rob Spillman describes it this way”

Ben Marcus, who, in true literary-convention-spanking style presents us with “The Moors,” in which he blatantly ignores Fiction Rule Number 12: It is impossible to write a thirty-seven page story about a hapless man tied in knots over what to say to a colleague as they arrive at the coffee station at the same time.

That doesn’t quite do this story justice. It will make you laugh. It will make you want to beat the ever-living snot out of the narrator. It will make you question your own sanity by the time you finish it. The Moors is the break room in the labs where the narrator, Thomas, works. He describes it this way:

" The Moors may just as well have had a genital-removal station you visited on your way out, water-fountain height, retractable into the wall. Tilt in your hips and come back clean. And the egghead architects laughing and pointing, maybe even rubbing themselves into states of ecstasy… It was a pornographic pleasure, no doubt, to watch people killed in buildings, killed slowly, brought just near death and held in suspension simply by precalculated dimensions, by room design."

You see, in real time the events of the story would probably take five minutes at the most, but Thomas goes on for thirty-seven pages thinking of these things in his head, while the attractive co-worker in front of him pours her coffee. To give you a clue as to Thomas’ mental state, he describes his co-worker breathing as “A soft wall wall swollen with something almost unbearably luscious underneath. Was that an okay thought to have? Hello soft wall, he wanted to say. I love you.”

There is much more sweet goodness in this issue, but I feel I have already overstayed my welcome. I will leave you with Ana Menendez’s excellent essay about traveling through Afghanistan in the late 1990s- “From Kandahar to Herat.” Menendez witnesses boy soldiers patrolling the streets with whips and a Friday execution. Her epiphany comes when she is traveling through Dasht- e- Margow, “The Desert of Death.” They are caught on the road after dark because of car trouble. Bandits are a serious fear. She writes, “As the sun began to set and the desert went on and on, panic started to set in. What if the drivers were in league with the bandits? How would we respond to a roadblock? To a rape?”

And then, of course, they encounter a roadblock. As they approach, their fear turns to joy. “The translator cheered: ‘It’s Taliban!’” They CHEERED because it was Taliban. They were safe. Menendex concludes,

" …The image lingers more than a decade later. “Taliban!” With what joy we said it. And with that flood of relief, I remember, also came a terrible wisdom. In the years since, I’ve learned not to rush to understanding. That life’s brutality can be unfathomable. And that freedom is a pleasing abstraction until some horror finds you vulnerable and alone. Then, you gladly trade your visions of hell for a truck full of boy soldiers who once filled you only with a pure and uncomplicated fear."

Yep. I’m glad I re-subscribed. ( )