Introduction

HIDDEN SHAME, SHAME, SHAME/And I can’t get free … Must it be my secret for eternity? / Till you know my hidden shame you really don’t know me. So goes a catchy little tune by Elvis Costello, originally written for and recorded by Johnny Cash. As a literary genre, the confession looks to Augustine and Rousseau as its patron saints, though neither would find much value in the ritual self-flagellation that so fascinates the public today. Costello himself, née Declan Patrick MacManus, is one of rock’s most protean changelings. Whatever act, or failure to act, inspired Elvis to pen these words, it probably wasn’t the memory of his first commercial vocals—backing up his father on “I’m a Secret Lemonade Drinker” — or that of getting punched out by Delaney’s Bonnie for drunkenly dissing James Brown and Ray Charles. And it would also be my guess that there is no actual accidental murder, with hints of homophobia (even though, in this song, that’s how the story goes), no best friend from boyhood whose death lies lurking in the British songster’s closet. Yet here, perhaps, his pop lyric really does reach toward the founding confessions, and the founders, of the Catholic Church and the modern state. Whatever you think they’re guilty of, you don’t know the half of it. They locked me up here for the ideas in my head/They never got me for the thing I really did.

Ruminating on such potential remonstrations, we begin this issue with two master classes: Thomas Devaney’s “First Instrument,” guaranteed to give even the most flip hipsters pause, followed by Mark Jay Mirsky’s magisterial meditation on “Other people’s stories.” If, at the close of his tale, Mirsky’s nod to Dante — Quali i fanciulli, vergognando, muti… — doesn’t leave you gasping for breath, you’d best take his lesson twice. Stories by Ken Harvey and Nicholas Montemarano also plumb the register of remorse; taking silence as their subject, both writers show where social predicates and prejudice predict, and perhaps even determine, individual, human failings. Our poets may have the answer, though you’ll have to choose between the insurgency of Sarah Holland-Batt and the solace of Amy Dryansky. And when Peter Bush, fresh off his Ramon Llull award-winning translation of Josep Pla’s The Gray Notebook, regales us with a WWI sea story from the same author, its climactic scene, to this reader at least, bears comparison with the epic aftermath of the battle scene in Kurosawa’s Kagemusha. History does have a way of assuring we never leave it behind: here, in an Ilan Stavans translation, Raúl Zurita recalls the final minutes before Chile’s September 11th, and Myriam J.A. Chancy counts out in seconds the horror of the Haitian earthquake. The bold photography of LaToya Ruby Frazier responds with family values to our national shame, refusing to let it remain hidden. And with the permission of his parents, and help from Martín Espada, we are proud to publish an excerpt from the novel GlobalPost journalist James W. Foley wrote for his MFA degree from UMass, La lucha sigue.

When the theme is shame, one might assume that humor will be hard to find. Turn then to Thomas Israel Hopkins’s slyly funny tale of ‘60s-era, prep-school, home-front hysteria. Or try sharing a tick quilt with Laura Willwerth’s bizarre, and familiar, family. Though definitely not on the lighter side, I should mention two other writers you likely haven’t yet read but certainly won’t forget. Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s tale of slave trafficking in Africa, like Allison Kade’s downtown horrorshow story of post-apocalypse, leave us left behind with their young protagonists, stunned and unsure how to go on. One answer, if there is an answer, would be to trust the elders: several short essays from Rafik Schami, ably rendered by Kristina Kalpaxis, offer both wit and wisdom aplenty, and certainly few stories could inspire us more than to learn of Tatiana Gnedich’s Russian translation of Byron’s Don Juan, done...