In “Go Out and Burn Them,” one of the standout stories in Greek writer Christos Ikonomou’s Something Will Happen, You’ll See, a bereaved widower is found climbing into a public trash bin. “Any man who lets his wife die like that,” he tells the passerby who stops him, “deserves to go out with the trash. They can pick me up and recycle me, maybe I’ll come out a more useful man.” It’s a striking expression of guilt, but also a rather absurd one—there was nothing that the widower, Sofronis babra-Tasos, could have done to save his wife. She had a form of cancer that no doctor in Greece could treat.

In “The Blood Drip,” the story that ends A Collapse of Horses, the new collection from Brian Evenson, two men on a postapocalyptic frontier have gathered beside a fire. Well, one of them might not be a man, exactly—a ghost, perhaps, or a hallucination? But still, it’s an archetypal scene: two men, a roaring fire that’s the only light and heat in sight, and the aftermath of violence. One offers to tell a story; the other wavers. The first makes his case: “It’s just a story. A story can’t hurt.”

Evenson’s body of work stands as a long and ominous proof that stories can, in fact, hurt. His

Few poets stood higher on Joseph Stalin’s hit list than Anna Akhmatova, the Soviet doyen of reverie and suffering who was born near the Black Sea in 1899 to an upper-class family. Like many in her literary milieu before the Russian Revolution, she revolted against drowsy symbolism and became a poet of spiritual clarity and of simplicity—but she always resisted the characterization of her poems as the work of a seductive poetess or a counter-revolutionary. She preferred to consider herself a poet of the soul. Certainly, the architects of Soviet ideology, first under Lenin and later under Stalin,

When the Supreme Court delivered its ruling in June 2015 confirming marriage equality, it was greeted as an historic civil rights achievement. Over the past several years, mounting marriage victories combined with a cresting wave of trans activism had already pushed legal advocates to think beyond gay marriage, the issue that has absorbed the bulk of the movement’s advocacy, resources, and powers of mass mobilization. From the legalization of homosexual assembly to the repeal of anti-sodomy laws and now national gay marriage, legal gains for LGBT people since World War II have brought important