Cover by Adrian Tomine.

Behold: our new Spring issue, with a cover by Adrian Tomine and a shade of yellow bright enough to bring the thaw. It includes an Art of Nonfiction interview with Luc Sante, who talks about growing up in the New York of the seventies and eighties and his fascination with “the intersection of specific time and place”:

This goes back to my teenage years. I would think, Jeez, 1972 feels so different from 1971 … I meant the feeling on the street, the feeling emanated by people, songs, the contents of the songs, what people were wearing. Trying to reproduce that elusive factor—it’s something I’ve tried to write about many, many times, and it’s impossible. I can only do it, kind of, by indirection. But my spelunking in that direction has nourished a lot of my work.

Sante contributed our portfolio, too: an annotated collection of the magazine ­covers, collages, flyers, and ephemera of his youth.

And Robert Caro, who has devoted himself to a five-volume life of Lyndon Johnson since 1976, discusses the Art of Biography:

Rhythm matters. Mood matters. Sense of place matters. All these things we talk about with novels, yet I feel that for history and biography to accomplish what they should accomplish, they have to pay as much attention to these devices as novels do.

You’ll also find James Tate’s final poem, discovered in his typewriter after his death; a story by Witold Gombrowicz never before published in English; the fourth and final installment of Chris Bachelder’s comic masterpiece The Throwback Special; new fiction from Jensen Beach, Benjamin Hale, Dana Johnson, Craig Morgan Teicher, and Anne-Laure Zevi; and poems by John Ashbery, Mary Jo Bang, Erica Ehrenberg, Amit Majmudar, J. D. McClatchy, Morgan Parker, Mary Ruefle, Frederick Seidel, and Cynthia Zarin.

Subscribe now!