Editor's Note
Sometimes I’ll be reading a story or staring really hard at an art piece and out of nowhere—boom—it’ll knock my socks off.
It’s like every paragraph is moving along and you’re thinking nice, cool, effective, and then it arrives. The perfect line. The kicker. And suddenly the world seems, if not brighter, at least momentarily less crappy.
This is the feeling I get when I read lines from Erin O’Malley like “the small planet of my scalp / gleaming toward someday / looking like myself.” It’s the beauty of Per Loufman’s narrator discussing his brother’s death by way of an impromptu Camry advertisement. It’s Caroline Curran describing a produce section (“Baby carrots in watery slime, clementines in mesh, bell peppers in cellophane”) and Sarah Lao meditating on language (“Say preserve. / Say perverse. Sing it”) and Lizzy Lemieux’s take on a men’s room (“so many Duchamps”).
Back in April, in a letter focused on the pandemic, George Saunders wrote: “there’s still work to be done, and now more than ever.” As I leave the magazine, I’ll be keeping an eye out for future issues because I know there are so many pieces out there just waiting to knock our socks off with their strength and beauty and compassion.
After six years on Penn Review, I’ve learned not to underestimate the talents of strangers.