Win McCormack

From the website: The writer's job is not simply to make the reader look at the world differently, but experience it in a new way. E.L. Doctorow says, "Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader--not the fact that it is raining but the feeling of being rained on." In their stories, Jamie Quatro, Ken Calhoun, and Joan Silber take you inside three wonderfully strange families, bathing us in details that make us feel as if we are with them. That rain isn't always a gentle summer shower. Sometimes it's a storm. This is what Adam Johnson does in his artful and disturbing short story, "Dark Meadow." In the simplest terms, the story is about child pornography. Yet Johnson, who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Orphan Master's Son, moves beyond the sensationalism of the conceit and into the deeper realm of empathy and pathos, which is the stuff of true art. I am proud that we are publishing it. Wherever you are reading this--on the beach, in a field of flowers, on the subway, sneaking it at the office--we hope that you have moments where time stops and art takes over.

Summer Reading. Vol. 15, No. 4

Tin House

From the website: Putting together a literary magazine is a joyful yet Sisyphean task. Just when you've pushed the boulder up the hill to the printer, back down it rolls. And with it go all the characters you've lived with and loved for months, all the small moments of joy and revelation, all the humor and sadness. From the bottom, you begin again, from scratch, always from scratch. Just as writers must court failure in order to transcend the known, we, too, are always looking to challenge ourselves. We search stories for that peculiar mix of the new and the ever-old true, but told anew. In this issue, we found it in young writer Helen Phillips's story "Flesh & Blood," about a woman who can see through people's skin. We saw it in veteran Stuart Dybek's fractured take on the operatic life in his story "Tosca." And in Benjamin Percy, too, no stranger to fictional and personal risks, who writes here of his monthlong liver detox (spoiler: no meat and no alcohol do not tame Percy's inner beast). Two books after being a New Voice in Tin House, Monica Ferrell returns to our pages with the poem "Oh You Absolute Darling." Always searching for fresh writing, in this issue we are happy to introduce three New Voices: David Feinstein, Sam Ross, and Eric Burg. The venerable writer William Gass, interviewed here, says, "So you try, but you probably will fail. It's a business. Failure is what happens." To risk, to dare-- that is his, and our, challenge. We're proud of this issue, but as always, we're never completely satisfied. We do, however, hope that we have failed better with this, our fifty-fourth try up the hill.

Winter Reading. Vol. 14, No. 2

From the website: In this issue, Tracy K. Smith captures a kind of awakening, via her young daughter, in her stunning poem "Dusk." In Carmen Machado's story "Blur," the protagonist sees the future clearly despite losing her glasses. In a previously untranslated story, "Pride," by Albert Camus, God wonders "In a world where seeking is impossible and everything is known, why then have the mind?" And Alexander Chee delivers gin-inspired revelations discovered on his global search for the perfect Martini.

Summer Reading. v. 18, no. 4

From the website: Rejection. Every writer faces it. But more interesting than the ways writers have been rejected are the ways writers reject. For Paul Beatty, the rejection is of our nation's shameful legacy of racism. In "Looking for Suzanne," Chris Kraus's rejected narrator tries to put the pieces of his enigmatic ex together, while in Claire Vaye Watkins's "The Call," futuristic California seems to have rejected everyone. Translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky refuse to accept that the classic translations of Russian classics are sacred, and have made a career of breathing new life into Anna Karenina, War and Peace, and Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, among many others. And channeling their spirit, perhaps, we embrace the opportunity to publish one of Chekhov's previously untranslated stories, "Artists' Wives." Not to be outdone, even from the grave, Hemingway weighs in with a pugilistic letter, also previously unpublished. We all know what being rejected feels like. So it seemed like a gift to offer a handful of writers, including Mitchell S. Jackson and Leslie Jamison, the opportunity to pen their own rejection letters. James Patterson, one of the best-selling authors of all time, addresses us all, urging us to reject rejection and rally around the flag of reading. And poet Mary Ruefle has the last word, flat out rejecting Tin House. Ouch. But you, dear readers, must know we'll never reject you.

Rejection. Vol. 16, No. 3

From the website: Aeschylus posited, "Memory is the mother of all wisdom." While true, memory also can be a trickster, and cruel. And why are some of our most emotionally laden memories incomplete, a scent or color or image triggering a flood of half-remembered events accompanied by an overwhelming sense of joy or dread? In this issue we wrestle with this imperfect and changeable source of all writing. Stephen King, Kevin Barry, Cheryl Strayed, Colum McCann, and Jodi Angel offer short takes on their strongest memories evoked by a piece of clothing or jewelry. Dana Spiotta and Rachel Kushner, two of America's sharpest cultural observers, talk about collective memory and the creative process of weaving the personal with the political. In "Moving On," Diane Cook imagines a future in which our former spouses are counseled out of our memories. The incomparable Joy Williams, in her story "The Country," asks, "Why are we here?" C. K. Williams offers a "Little Hymn to Time," Charlie Smith asks "Why Harp on It?," and Troy Jollimore plumbs the "Past Imperfect." I hope you enjoy this trip down memory lane.

Memory. Vol. 15, No. 3

Rob Spillman

Holly MacArthur

Featuring fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from established authors and new voices alike, the Candy Issue explores those sweet, seductive things we crave, but that might also ruin us. Candy is all sugary, brightly colored, dangerous temptation—from jawbreakers to candy floss. From the comforting and childlike to those desirable things that can easily turn lurid and even destructive.Featuring stories, essays, and poems on appetites and the pursuit of pleasure, the hard edge on something sickly sweet, and the eternal allure of something you can’t quite trust. Candy—everyone wants more than is good for them.

Tin House: Candy (Tin House Magazine)

Tin House's Summer Reading brings you all the things you've come to expect from the acclaimed literary journal. Packed with thrilling fiction, introspective essays, and artful poetry, this issue is guaranteed to keep you in your seat for hours at a time--perfect for those long summer days on the porch.

Tin House: Summer 2014 (Tin House Magazine)

Tin House is an award-winning literary magazine that publishes new writers as well as more established voices; essays as well as fiction, poetry, and interviews.

Tin House: Summer 2013: Summer Reading Issue

The Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his followers were involved in nefarious activities including prostitution, drug smuggling, sexual abuse of children, and murder conspiracy. The Rajneesh Chronicles explains this behavior--and why the cult that committed the first act of bioterrorism in the U.S. was trying to cultivate a live AIDS virus. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, widely known as the "sex guru," fled India in 1981 and came to settle on a ranch in central Oregon, where he and his followers established the illegal city of Rajneeshpuram. In their effort to preserve the city, the Rajneeshees attempted during the 1984 election to take control of the Wasco County government by poisoning two county commissioners and over 700 potential voters in The Dalles, the county seat, with salmonella—the first act of bio-terrorism in U.S. history. Armed to the teeth with semiautomatic weapons, they threatened to defend the city to the death against any governmental intrusion, and hatched a plot to assassinate a U.S attorney. When the commune finally imploded and authorities arrived on the scene, they discovered that the Rajneesh nurse who had cultivated salmonella bacteria in the commune’s biological warfare laboratory was also trying to cultivate a live AIDS virus—which deranged group leaders clearly hoped to unleash on the rest on the world. The Rajneesh Chronicles is a collection of in-depth investigative and analytical articles published in Oregon Magazine covering the entire period from the time of the cult’s arrival in Oregon in mid-1981 to its dramatic disintegration at the end of 1985 (with an introductory chronology that extends the story up to the present). While most press treated the cult’s antics as a humorous sideshow typified by the Bhagwan’s dozens of Rolls-Royces, editor in chief Win McCormack and other of the magazine’s writers systematically exposed the full range of the Rajneeshees’ depraved behavior, including their involvement in prostitution and international drug smuggling, sexual exploitation of children, abuse of homeless people they imported into Rajneeshpuram to register as voters, and the use of brainwashing techniques bordering on torture. The tale of the Rajneesh has become an amorphous legend few inside or outside of Oregon actually understand. The Rajneesh Chronicles fully illuminates the shocking reality behind that legend.

The Rajneesh Chronicles: The True Story of the Cult that Unleashed the First Act of Bioterrorism on U.S. Soil

Tin House: Portland/Brooklyn (Tin House Magazine)

Elissa Schappell

Tin House #2

From the website: In the late 1980s, the British music critic Simon Reynolds coined the term "miserabilism" to describe Morrissey and the numerous Manchester bands spreading their very personal gloom across the globe. The word could also be applied to the "Merritt Parkway Novel," Gerald Howard's term for the miserabilist fiction produced within a stone's throw of the road cutting through affluent, suburban Connecticut, from Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road to Rick Moody's The Ice Storm. Howard reevaluates the cultural impact of these novels and examines their continuing influence. Fittingly, Tin House 52 features work pushing the realistic envelope, including Amy Hempel's powerful, closely observed story "A Full Service Shelter," Alice Munro's older couple coming to grips with mortality in "Dolly," Sherman Alexie's poem of loss and legacies in "Crazy Horse Boulevard," and Anne Carson's poetic essay on the idea of threat in "We Point the Bone." Consider this summer reading as providing a few grains of sand in your suntan lotion, a little bit of grit to remind you of the depth and breadth of the human condition.

Summer Reading. Vol. 13, No. 4

From the website: Travel, like great writing, makes us look at the world through new eyes. This past summer I searched for stories over four continents, from Florence to Portland to Lima to Brisbane. And I was continually rewarded by narrative, in its many forms, from the 15th century paintings in Florence and Cuzco, to poems I heard read aloud in Portland and Brisbane. After a week deep in the Amazon, I was hardly a local but I became acclimated enough to see and appreciate everything I'd missed when I first arrived. It is the same with reading--we enter every new work of fiction or poetry as a stranger, an outsider, and if the author is a sure and able guide, as Steven Millhauser is in "Arcadia" or Paul Willems is in "Cathedral of Mist," then his world becomes a place we experience on all levels. Such authenticity transcends borders, language, and time. In rare moments of transcendence my experience of a story or poem felt like a slap to the face. The alchemical mix of language and idea so jarred me that I was forced to reexamine my previous assumptions. One such instance was when Major Jackson read from his epic poem-in-progress, "OK Cupid," at our Writer's Workshop in Portland. There was a collective intake of breath when he launched and it seemed like no one exhaled until the last line. I hope it hits you as hard as it did us.

Winter Reading. Vol. 15, No. 2

Tin House: Wild (Tin House Magazine)

Lee Montgomery

Holly Macarthur

Tin House: the Ecstatic

‘Bhagwan is God, and...the disciples of God cannot be made to submit to any of the laws established for ordinary human beings. To attain our goal, everything is permitted.’ – Kristina Koppel, Rajneesh disciple arrested for international drug smuggling One of the most controversial spiritual leaders to have emerged from India in the twentieth century, godman Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho, amassed thousands of followers from across the world in the 1970s, preaching a mix of free love and mysticism from his ashram in Pune. When tensions between him and then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi came to a head, Rajneesh was forced to move his followers to Oregon in the United States, where his disciples toiled day and night to build the fanciful city of Rajneeshpuram, complete with its own police and fire departments, schools, malls, townhouses, as well as an airstrip and a reservoir. But as the ‘Rajneeshes’ began to invade the surrounding towns, locals registered vehement protests, causing the Oregon state government to intervene and call into question the legitimacy of Rajneeshpuram. What followed was a bizarre series of events, with the cult being accused of launching the first campaign of bio-terrorism in the history of the United States, poisoning 751 people in the town of The Dalles, Oregon. Here is the astonishing story of the happenings, from beginning to end, told in real-time dispatches from reporters on the ground.

Win McCormack

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