Betrayal
Joyce Carol Oates
Orange Roses
Lucy Ives
Torpor
Brian Evenson
By the Time You Read This
Yannick Murphy
Six Poems
G. C. Waldrep
AWOL
Robert Olen Butler
Up the Hill
Miranda Mellis
Pach\'
Robert Coover
Six Poems
Justin Wymer
Seven Poems
Ann Lauterbach
The Tower
Frederic Tuten
Three Stories
Joanna Ruocco
The Cubes
Karen Hays
Next to Nothing
Stephen O’Connor
Prospects Of and At
Marjorie Welish
Venus
Translated by Chen Zeping, Translated by Karen Gernant and Can Xue
The Girl with the Prefabricated Heart
J. W. McCormack
( )
Gabriel Blackwell
Peace Poems
Gillian Conoley
Suspension as a Unit of Experience; or, What She Remembered of the Vanishing Lines
John Madera
The Collector\'s Beginning
Joanna Scott
Five Poems
Maxine Chernoff
In Each Room, Some Unadorned Spectacle
Matt Bell
Venus at Her Mirror
Benjamin Hale
Four Stories
Kim Chinquee
The Removes
Brandon Krieg
Organisms
Julia Elliott
The Silver World
Carole Maso
Elfking Suite
Charles Bernstein
Three Dramolets
Robert Walser, Translated by Daniele Pantano and Translated by James Reidel
Cover art by Chad Wys: Nocturne 93, 2011, c-print, 30″ x 24″, from the series Nocturnes (Set 1). © Chad Wys; all rights reserved.
Things gone missing. People vanished or changed beyond recognition. A once-bedrock belief now so alien as not to seem believable anymore. A woman’s threat of suicide. A man’s phantom limb. Another who comes home from prison only to find that home is no longer what it was, friends no longer who they were. Love gained, love lost. A promise forgotten. A couple gone off the grid into the woods and ghost-plagued madness. An exceptionally ill-timed death.
These are among the many scenarios explored in the pages of In Absentia. What we have assembled here is a literary compendium about the presence of absence. From Joyce Carol Oates’s story of a young protagonist whose devotion to working with bonobos at a zoo leads him on a journey far beyond the normal districts of primatology to Karen Hays’s essay on a wide spectrum of subjects—not the least of which is the metaphysics of the fourth dimension—these works attempt to observe the unobservable, to see what isn’t quite there.
We are honored also to include three previously untranslated “dramolets” by Robert Walser as a special feature. Walser, who personally knew more than most about loss and absence, is seen here in a fresh light thanks to Daniele Pantano and James Reidel’s deft translations. I want to thank Dr. Petra Hardt of Suhrkamp Verlag for her generosity in granting us permission to publish these historically important pieces. I believe that readers who already admire Walser’s vision and achievement will find his remarkable plays a cause for celebration.
Managing Editor
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