Project MUSE®: Kenyon Review - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Kenyon Review.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 40 (2018) through current issueLatest Articles: Kenyon ReviewTWOProject MUSE®Kenyon Review2327-83070163-075XLatest articles in Kenyon Review. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989800
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The 2025 Kenyon Review Nonfiction Contest was judged by Lucy Ives, author of An Image of My Name Enters America: Essays (Graywolf Press, 2024) and Life Is Everywhere: A Novel (Graywolf Press, 2022). From the contest's entries, Ives selected "Through the Mirror" by Jessie Cato. Ives writes:"Through the Mirror" is a brief and devastating portrait of a father. Entirely unsentimental, the essay is an act of witnessing and brave mourning. It asks us to reflect on a singular human mystery, one that many of us are encountering right now: How do we, the children of parents who have failed to love themselves, begin to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallIntroduction2026-05-15text/htmlen-USIntroduction2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®17712026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Through the Mirror
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989801
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My dad was released from prison eighteen months before I was born, but I never knew him as a free man. As a child I used to marvel watching him eat beetroot straight from the tin, standing over the sink and picking up slices gently with his fingers. He'd drop them into his mouth, head turned up to catch any drips, his caution leaving his clothes spot free but his fingertips stained pink. I wish now a piece had fallen one day, the deep red juice landing and spreading across his T-shirt, so I could have laughed. So he could have seen it didn't matter to anyone if it left a mark, at least not anyone who mattered to him."What are you doing here?""What are you doing here?" I fire back.I am at my grandparents' door
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallThrough the Mirror2026-05-15text/htmlen-USThrough the Mirror2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®101972026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15To listen with the ears of the heart
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989803
<p></p>
We took the vaporetto, the first trip to the abbey, and walked across the terrace and through the church hall. At the bell tower, I stood to the side of the line and waited for the tour group to go ahead.I told the man behind the plastic ticket window that I was a student. That I had emailed, asking to visit a garden on the Benedictine abbey's grounds where a group of architects had previously installed a chicken coop, a pergola, lemon trees, a seed library — a living laboratory for the encyclicals of Pope Francis.By then, I knew monks emailed on God's time and Italians emailed on time that dilated, languorous, in the summer months. I'd emailed in April. It was now June. There was only one answer: Show up in Venice
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallTo listen with the ears of the heart2026-05-15text/htmlen-USTo listen with the ears of the heart2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®267502026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Periodic table of the elements, and: Holy Saturday
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989804
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When the elements are arranged in order of their atomic numbers an approximate recurrence of their properties is evident.I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required.Water, linen, pale blue flax (from which linen comes) flowering at 11 a.m. (the hour of the ceasefire), dark pink roses (a regular profusion of certain unidentified roses!1) on whitewashed outbuildings seen from a train, body over body lying in the mud of two wars (are we in 1918 or are we in 2018?): and the wind is moving across the train and over everything (interruption after interruption; the mind makes itself a Midas2 or did I mean don't worry baby3), and then all of a sudden we pull in to the station as if a magic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallPeriodic table of the elements, and: Holy Saturday2026-05-15text/htmlen-USPeriodic table of the elements, and: Holy Saturday2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®174412026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15The Disparate Heart
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989806
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Halfway through my third year of marriage, I felt nauseous, lightheaded, off. A few weeks late on my often erratic period, I hadn't thought much of it, but after a day of fighting through dizziness while teaching second graders about polygons and superstar sentences, I stopped at the drugstore on my way home. The Clearblue test showed two parallel lines. An ultrasound days later confirmed I was six weeks pregnant. My husband laced his fingers through mine as we marveled at the grainy image on the screen: a dime-size clamshell collapsing and unfolding with each galloping drumbeat.Even before my first inkling of pregnancy, fetal cells inside my body communicated with one another — deciding which cells would begin the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallThe Disparate Heart2026-05-15text/htmlen-USThe Disparate Heart2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®180742026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15St. Monica and Her Son St. Augustine Enjoy a Meal at the Tombs of the Dead, and: St. Augustine's Voyage to Rome Nears its Conclusion
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989807
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I saw a peasant woman sitting on a grave under the trees with a dish of wheat and milk on her lap, the sunlight dappling the white kerchief on her head. Another peasant woman came by. … I think they were total strangers.They greeted each other, and the woman with the dish held it out to the new-comer and gave her a spoon . … To me it was an enchantment; for when St. Monica came to Milan over fifteen hundred years ago . … that protocol-loving saint, Ambrose, had forbidden the practice because it was too like picknicking for his type of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallSt. Monica and Her Son St. Augustine Enjoy a Meal at the Tombs of the Dead, and: St. Augustine's Voyage to Rome Nears its Conclusion2026-05-15text/htmlen-USSt. Monica and Her Son St. Augustine Enjoy a Meal at the Tombs of the Dead, and: St. Augustine's Voyage to Rome Nears its Conclusion2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®138782026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15In Penal Colony ×
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989808
<p></p>
At my home in Seoul, in the middle of the night, long after dinnertime, though not because I was hungry, I went to the kitchen at the end of a vacant series of thoughts and, as if in a daze, unthinkingly poured water into a pot, set it on the stove, and lit the gas, and looking at the water boil like someone also in a daze, yet someone different from the one who poured water into the pot and set it on the stove, forgetting what I'd just done, also unthinkingly cooking some noodles in the pot, and again, like a third person, different from the one who poured water into the pot and set it on the stove and the one who cooked noodles in the pot, looking at the strands of noodles flailing uncontrollably in the boiling
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallIn Penal Colony ×2026-05-15text/htmlen-USIn Penal Colony ×2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®193562026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Armilla
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989812
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Where does the house end? Is the line between the house and the home the bed and the refrigerator and the television?Or is it the act of occupation?The house is a system of different, overlapping layers. The biomechanics of the human body mesh and interact with the structural and auxiliary systems of the house at certain points that have been designated through its design and construction. These points mediate the tension between the human and the nonhuman. The points of interaction are obvious: the taps, the stovetop, the doors, the windows, the light switches. Particularly if you rent your house, interaction with these nodes is the only time the systems will be visible to you. Your manipulation of these systems
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallArmilla2026-05-15text/htmlen-USArmilla2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®140212026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Honey Bees of the Exclusion Zone, and: 3 a.m
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989813
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In the shadows of Soviet statues, honey-making bees thrive.For
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallHoney Bees of the Exclusion Zone, and: 3 a.m2026-05-15text/htmlen-USHoney Bees of the Exclusion Zone, and: 3 a.m2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®64422026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15The Golden Apples of Little River, Alabama
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989814
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Sharks are older than the North Star and gingko trees are the last of their kind and Shasta Lee was the first waitress at Diamond Jim's Steakhouse to carry three forty-eight-ounce porterhouses, tray perched atop her fingertips. She used to drive semis on I-40, but what she wanted was to roll around the body of the country, not pass through it, and highways are called arteries for a reason. Now here she was, thirty-four with a trick knee, and in a tough spot at Diamond Jim's — Young Mike trying to marry her, and her not wanting to piss off Young Mike when up until last week she'd had a good thing going with his sister, even if it was, so to speak, off the books.The pastor's wife, who also happened to be Young Mike's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallThe Golden Apples of Little River, Alabama2026-05-15text/htmlen-USThe Golden Apples of Little River, Alabama2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®426202026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15The Swan, No. 12, and: The Bear
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989815
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After Hilma af KlintI stood in front of so much stained glass. With my mouth open. Yet nothing could be swallowed. Even Marc Chagall's stained glass windows in Fraumünster looked black and white. But look how the bottom of af Klint's triangle squeezes something so hard, I can feel it 109 years later. At the root of every woman is a triangle filled with colors. A triangle that pushes at a circle hard, but not too hard. So that the pressed thing doesn't puncture. This year, my triangle feels so heavy because I have gained fifteen pounds of joy. I never thought I could eat so little and still gain joy. They said joy was the thing we needed to find. All this time, it was actually emptiness. Lately, I have tried too
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallThe Swan, No. 12, and: The Bear2026-05-15text/htmlen-USThe Swan, No. 12, and: The Bear2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®99052026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15I Molt with You
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989817
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The month before my stepfather, Vaughn, goes into a skilled nursing facility for progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), my ex-boyfriend gets a ghost praying mantis and names him Pimento. Nickname PB. This ex and I are in his apartment in Denver. I'm thirty-six and don't like Denver but am here for a conference because that's the kind of person I am now — the kind who goes to conferences. The apartment we are in is the same one he lived in when he moved here from New Mexico nine years ago. It's a one-bedroom in an industrial-looking building on a busy three-way intersection. The hallways are tan and windowless. The apartment doors are beige with silver numbers. Black and brown welcome mats cover the linoleum floor. I
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallI Molt with You2026-05-15text/htmlen-USI Molt with You2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®294772026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15What the Photos Didn't Reveal
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989819
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After the fact, after the sheriff's department wrapped up its investigation and people had begun to move on, the photos on the wife's phone came into my possession. How this happened, I'm not at liberty to disclose (or actually, I choose not to, at least not for the purposes of this story, which in any case isn't much more than a rough go at the screenplay to follow). Suffice to say I have my means and that the wife's sister, Lorna, has given me her blessing because she wants the story told in a more poignant and imaginative way than what the news outlets have been able to muster, and if we've discussed various A-listers who might be induced to play her sister, Pili, and Pili's husband, Louis, that's only to be
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallWhat the Photos Didn't Reveal2026-05-15text/htmlen-USWhat the Photos Didn't Reveal2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®315362026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15The Enemy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989821
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Near the end of the war, my father had a week's vacation from his job as head usher at the Paramount Theater, and he drove us from Arlington, Massachusetts, to Henniker, New Hampshire, in the green Packard: Mama, Douglas, and me. Mrs. Behrendt's farmhouse sat alone at the end of a long dirt road, near a field of tall feathery grass. Its white shingles shone in the afternoon sun, and inside, there was a smell that was old and clean, like the quilts piled in the wooden chest at the foot of the iron bed where I'd be sleeping. I could smell it in the faded wallpaper, too, breathing it in when I rested my cheek against the wall next to the bed. Faded brown stripes and small pink flowers."Cele, get her out of there!" My
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallThe Enemy2026-05-15text/htmlen-USThe Enemy2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®189802026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Hawk Moth, and: London Zoo, and: Charm City, and: Had We But World Enough
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989823
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For Saskia
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallHawk Moth, and: London Zoo, and: Charm City, and: Had We But World Enough2026-05-15text/htmlen-USHawk Moth, and: London Zoo, and: Charm City, and: Had We But World Enough2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®76462026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Body as Rebellion
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989829
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Every session begins with lighting tests. Tentative shutter clicks as you shift how shadow drapes the nose, the right ear, a corner. More shutter clicks. (Is the battery charged?) Absent-minded compositions guiding where light, honeyed and gleaming, sits. To soften a clavicle, the wrinkle of a smile. To color silence in measured breaths. I exhale for the photographic encounter: In a sixtieth of a second, my finger finds a button — click — the lights floodShoot!The maker of a photograph is a triggerShoot!This = black-bodied figure with beauty at the end of its ready-aim-Shoot!In fractions of a second, beauty is made as it is taken — in sixteenths, thirty-seconds, sixty-fourths — in spaces only breaths pass, in and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallBody as Rebellion2026-05-15text/htmlen-USBody as Rebellion2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®121152026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Body Scan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989831
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I passed through the body scanner in a Midwestern American airport and emerged to find I'd set off an alert. There had been no audible alarm, but a Transportation Security Officer stopped me with a blue-rubber-gloved hand to ask if she could conduct a full body check. The officer gestured toward a screen standing upright in the middle of the floor; it showed an abstract outline of my body, or a body meant to represent mine, like a chalk outline of a dead person. At the top of the V created by the legs was a solid red square, as if the chalked body had emerged overly anatomically precise and required censoring. Something in my groin had alerted Security.I stood between two lines of people waiting for their laptops
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallBody Scan2026-05-15text/htmlen-USBody Scan2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®350582026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15When I voice-to-text "How long have you been divorced?" and my phone hears "How long have you been a horse?", and: Swallow's Song
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989832
<p></p>
After Brigit Pegeen
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallWhen I voice-to-text "How long have you been divorced?" and my phone hears "How long have you been a horse?", and: Swallow's Song2026-05-15text/htmlen-USWhen I voice-to-text "How long have you been divorced?" and my phone hears "How long have you been a horse?", and: Swallow's Song2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®60532026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15A Prayer Against Etiquette, and: Despedida Prayer
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989834
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For C
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallA Prayer Against Etiquette, and: Despedida Prayer2026-05-15text/htmlen-USA Prayer Against Etiquette, and: Despedida Prayer2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®61912026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15The Near Abyss
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989835
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It was chance that led me back to Pascal and his Pensées.A friend had been hospitalized at Cochin, in Paris, and to amuse her during my visit, I suggested we go out for some fresh air. I had completed my studies at that hospital, and years later, I had been treated there for an aggressive lymphoma; I knew where to head for calm. I led her to what remains of the Abbey of Port-Royal. She didn't know the place, and we wandered there for an hour or so before I took her back to her room. Having left her, I departed via the cloister, which adjoins the chapel and the chapter house. The cloister houses union and administrative offices, a launderette, and on the floor overlooking the central garden, the on-call room.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallThe Near Abyss2026-05-15text/htmlen-USThe Near Abyss2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®249712026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Post-Pandemic
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989837
<p></p>
After Mary
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallPost-Pandemic2026-05-15text/htmlen-USPost-Pandemic2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®42352026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Built Close to Water, No. 2
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989839
<p></p>
In German, someone who cries easily is said to be nah am Wasser gebaut: built close to the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallBuilt Close to Water, No. 22026-05-15text/htmlen-USBuilt Close to Water, No. 22026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®28132026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15A Little More Than Life: In Defense of Some Barely Mitigated Suffering
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989842
<p></p>
Catastrophic and violent, C. Mallon's debut novel, Dogs (Scribner, 2025), is littered with pink. Pink is an interior color here, less pillow, more brain, less bubblegum, more watered-down blood that someone is really, really trying to take care of. Pink is used 66 times in 208 pages, and most of these uses show us the tender and the grotesque housed together in a single object or piece of anatomy. In these thrumming, frequent swatches, we get flashes of the heart of this novel before its chest is fully cracked open. Dogs isn't for everyone. It asks, more than once, What is the worst thing? And then it answers, as a howl from a neighboring yard might call out to your dachshund, which you desperately wish would go to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallA Little More Than Life: In Defense of Some Barely Mitigated Suffering2026-05-15text/htmlen-USA Little More Than Life: In Defense of Some Barely Mitigated Suffering2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®163912026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Succumbing to Projection
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989843
<p></p>
I pressed Record on my iPhone and reached for the brown leather journal. It was time for my landlady to start explaining herself.Earlier that week, L had invited me over to her house. During my last visit, the prior spring, Brent and I had ceremoniously signed a lease to her pool house, nicknamed the "casita." Today, I walked across the backyard to her home, where she led me into the dining room. Its violet walls were adorned with family portraits and framed posters advertising her past exhibitions. In one corner stood L's tableau sculpture of a suited man wielding a fish as a gun. Many of her artworks included a body of water as the background: oceans and rivers, and pools attached to pristine modernist mansions.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallSuccumbing to Projection2026-05-15text/htmlen-USSuccumbing to Projection2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®364732026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Contributors' Notes
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989844
<p></p>
Patrick Autréaux is the author of dozens of books and articles. The view of illness as an inner experience informs his first cycle of writing, ending with Se survivre (Verdier, 2013). Dans la vallée des larmes (In the Valley of Tears) was published in English by UIT Books (USA) in 2019. In 2024, Pussyboy (Verdier, 2021), his novel about an erotic passion, was published in Spanish by Canta Mares (Mexico). His latest novel, L'époux, was published by Gallimard in 2025. His fiction and essays have appeared in translation in Asymptote, Socrates on the Beach, 3:AM Magazine, and elsewhere. Autréaux divides his time between Paris and Cam-bridge, Massachusetts.Flora Elmi Beagley is a writer based in London. She won the 2025
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/768/image/coversmallContributors' Notes2026-05-15text/htmlen-USContributors' Notes2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®258832026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15