Richard Russo returns home to a hometown on the verge of extinction. Up-and-coming fiction writer Claire Vaye Watkins explores a damaged car on an abandoned road and a Ziploc bag of pristine letters. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shows what happens when a married man's old flame threatens to return to Lagos. A young Iris Murdoch writes devotional letters to the older French Surrealist and Oulipo co-founder Raymond Queneau. Hal Crowther delivers a blistering critique of the Internet's erosion of solitude.
With extracts from Mark Twain's never-before published memoir on childhood and Colin Grant's highly anticipated memoir "Bageye at the Wheel"; new poetry from Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, and Nicholas Christopher; and a photographic essay by Ian Teh.
Further works include Elizabeth McCracken's stirring tale of a young widower and the traces we leave behind; Leila Aboulela's story of an aspiring Sudanese academic's return to London with his young Muslim wife; foreign correspondent Janine Di Giovanni's return to Sarajevo to search for a boy she knew fifteen years ago; Peter Orner's examination of the question 'When does a place become something else?' in Chappaquiddick; and Joseph O'Neill on the breaking of America.