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Illustration by Chad Wys

The Partition

By Don Lee, Illustrations by Chad Wys

Summer 2020

Mainly, she wanted to be left alone. She didn’t want a husband or a wife or a partner or a lover, she didn’t want a companion or a pet or friends, she didn’t want to be closer to her parents or siblings or relatives. She enjoyed her solitude, relished it. She had plenty to occupy herself—her work, her house and garden, her hobbies. She was not at all lonely. She was thoroughly happy, being alone.

This perplexed people.

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Photo by Ryan Bradley.

The Air Keeps It Interesting

By Ryan Bradley

Fall 2016

1. In the darkness it was nothing but a thin low thrum, moving to a higher pitch as it neared. The Goodyear Blimp was somewhere out there. I stared into the sky off Venice Beach, California, trying to locate the thing. A woman in a polo shirt (Goo [...]

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Illustrations by Jen Renninger

Total Loss

By Jen Choi, Illustrations by Jen Renninger

Winter 2016

Fire does not abide by reason. In its destructive trail, there are empty bank accounts, unreturned voice mails, FedExed checks, hours upon hours of smooth-jazz hold music, fine print written in inscrutable jargon, and the summary Laurie learned to say for expediency’s sake: “My house exploded in a catastrophic fire. Can you please help me?”

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Wayne Thiebuad, San Francisco West Side Ridge, 2001. Oil on canvas, 36 x 36”. (ART ©WAYNE THIEBAUD / LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YORK, NY. COURTESY OF SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, WASHINGTON DC / ART RESOURCE, NY)

Fifteen Takes on California

By David L. Ulin

Summer 2015

California as land’s end, world’s end: It collapses underneath the weight of such a reading, as it must. It reveals the limits of our history—demographic history, social history, history of technology, our sense of this place as final landscape, last territory on the continent, where we face ourselves because there is nowhere to turn.

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Dislocation on Pacific Coast Highway

By Dennis Purcell, Photography by Rosamond Purcell, Dennis Purcell

Summer 2015

We had been going much too fast to make a perfect scan, yet the camera, in attempting to stitch together the vertical slices, had made a very interestingly distorted hash of the scene, one which somehow captured the architecture, the street traffic, and also the uneasy mood of the photographer.

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Illustration by Raquel Aparicio

My Life in the New Age

By Porochista Khakpour

Summer 2015

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked ••• angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connectionto the starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . .” —Allen Ginsberg, “Howl, [...]

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