An exclusive audio interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and Michigan native Jeffrey Eugenides.

The centerpiece of our September issue is an hour-long discussion with musician Will Oldham. I believe this interview offers a rare and unique insight into the mind of one of contemporary music’s finest. Our September edition also features a stream of the moving compilation album “Burning Heart: Songs for the Gulf,” and we’re pleased to announce that all sales of this record benefit the clean-up effort of last...

Christopher Keller The garage is full now. Glass apple trees, a great flood of fermentation and an aroma of old tools fawning over tannin. These sweets breathe through the foundation, their sugar cocooned and ready to emerge in industry, or wilderness – whatever makes the taste best. Our acidity is threefold: that of abandoned Oregon dams, an apple from a farmer’s market, and the subtle fizz of a cool sip. Christopher Keller is...

Nanette Rayman-Rivera When I want to be in Eretz Israel— And the intermission, the maybe-tomorrow that I felt everlasting, the antipathetic, the affirmative action that made lightning rods out of me, after months in beige flatlands the seam between the worlds cracked and I ceased to be. I become the intermission, my intractable-alone affliction hidden from imaginary eyewitnesses who seem so many agape aliens— No one to approach who...

J.S. Simmons The ad in the back of the paper claimed she was twenty-three. As she climbed the stairs and smiled, chin lifted toward the landing, Jack saw the lines in her face, the gray strands at the crown of her head where roots showed beneath the bleach job. He tried to tell himself it didn’t matter but the best he could do was recognize that one got what he paid for, one hundred-twenty-five dollars. She wasn’t fat. She had a...

Allison Grayhurst I know the vines that pin a desire to the dirt. I walk the miles of compulsive destruction and the weeping despair that laps all light from the stream. I sit bound to the spot. In and out of days with blood under my fingernails and hands that can’t stay still. Have I not given enough? Have I placed meaning in the marketplace or belief in the computer-screen throne of inner Armageddon? Like a split artichoke, my...

Jacob T. McCall They say my hands are strong enough to draw blood on the bits in a colt’s

 mouth. They don’t notice
 how I will only eat collards 
 for a month before the post-date.

 As trainers pace chestnut geldings and smoky colts over   the Kentucky clay, training them for the derby, I rise by moonlight   and pass out my strength to the soil below the outhouse. My race has   only given me the notices of...

Carl Swart Night has carried her breath from her Like gypsy moths dancing in snow, That floated down the lattice while she dreamt Of pink-tinged canna lilies opening at sunrise, And out in the field a hollow bell rang, Its song drifting over the red wheat. By the moon’s dim lantern, her mother’s Storm-filled throat spilled harmony. The truant spirit with sly white fingers Poured like milk through stray grains of rye, Milk in the...

Scott Hightower “Birds for a Demolition” Manoel de Barros; translated by Idra Novey Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010, 978-0-88748-523-7, $16.95 Birds for a Demolition is a compilation of poems by the celebrated poet Manoel de Barros. Life on the rural Pantanal (the beautiful, tropical wetlands of Brazil, in the northeastern corner of the country, near Paraguay) lies as the center of this poet’s expression. The Pantanal is a...

Katharine Whalen, former vocalist and banjoist for Squirrel Nut Zippers, has just released her new project, "Madly Love." A stream of this melodic and thoughtful record serves as this month's featured album.