From the editors

In our work over the past few months, we at Clarion have attempted to gather together stories and poems that will have a lasting quality to our readers.

Highlights include: Rayyan Al-Shawaf ’s story “The Order of the Forsaken Empire” portrays political and cultural disruption in mid-century Egypt with delicate formalism. A view on the subject we hope will be relevant to the world’s current issues.

Our long interview with Tom Simmons, a BU alumnus like his interviewer Sandy SooHoo, makes for a useful frame to consider his provocative stories (for example, “The Great American Hangover” in Clarion 15). Plots and style that might seem the work of an underachieving misanthropist can be seen more clearly as deeply subtle and committed satire when you hear from the author himself.

This issue is the first in which we are working as collaborative co-editors, and the first to have been born on screens residing in the Pen & Anvil workspace on Newbury Street instead of on laptops balanced precariously on the knees of editors working in improvised squats (e.g. Trident Cafe, the third floor of Mugar, the sunny but heavily-trafficked front steps of the College of Arts & Sciences). We hope that will help improve the quality of the work we are presenting you with.

Jonathan Maniscalco and Frances Gossen
August 2013

<< Back to Issue 16, 2013