In a particularly funny moment in Glen David Gold’s Sunnyside, set during World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II thumbs through a captured copy of Photoplay in his imperial water closet. His Highness learns that starlet Mary Miles Minter associates people she meets with pretty colors. Mary Pickford, for example, is marigold with a narrow stripe of violet. Why someone would pay twenty cents to learn this eludes him. Then he wonders, if he met her, “What color [would she] think he was?” Disgusted with himself, he tosses the magazine across the room. But, sheepishly, he retrieves it to finish the article.

The eight stories in Lydia Peelle’s debut collection are remarkable for their clarity and precision. Set primarily in the dwindling forests and farmland surrounding Nashville, Tennessee, they concern the estrangement between modern life and nature, unsettling the reader’s hope for an easy reconciliation between the two.

The opening story, “Mule Killers,” involves the arrival of tractors at a family farm and the elimination of traditional animal labor. The tale is told in retrospect, when the narrator’s father is eighteen and still outgrowing his boyish love for Orphan Lad, a mule he rides to

At a moment in history when God is said to participate in world politics, the pungent ode to nature De rerum natura, composed by the Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus, can provide a dose of sanity. What the atomist Epicurus called ataraxia—the tranquility of mind achieved when one is freed from the fear of occult controllers—Lucretius transformed into a prophetic materialism. His lyric treatise, published in the first century bce, predicts everything from atomic physics to the existence of DNA and casts it all in melodious hexameters.

Unlike the many prose versions of De rerum natura, David

The opening lines of J. Robert Lennon’s fifth novel, Castle, describe a landscape of impenetrable wilderness, an image that comes to pervade the book. The narrator, a plainspoken man named Eric Loesch, has just returned to his hometown and purchased a large tract of undeveloped forest on the “far western edge of the county,” with only a dilapidated farmhouse at its edge. Loesch has almost no family and few friends and seems determined to avoid any connection to his old life in the area. “I tend to align myself,” he explains, “against the present cultural obsession with the past. . . . I do not

Andrew Joron is a modern-day alchemist. He’s not interested in solipsistic self-enrichment; rather, he practices the art of transformation. Translator of Marxist-utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch’s Literary Essays (1998) and author of a study titled Neo-Surrealism; Or, The Sun at Night (2004) and the volume of essays and prose poems The Cry at Zero (2007), as well as a handful of poetry collections, including the remarkable Fathom (2003), Joron has always been a thinker in multiple genres. Though aligned with the revolutionary impulse behind Surrealism—the conjuring of paradox to expand the