Tin House The Political Issue Fall 2008

The literary magazine people are talking about.

“Beha tackles finance, faith, war, entitlement, and no end of self-destructive acts. I greatly admired both the writing and the ambition.” —Ann Patchett A New York Times Editors’ Choice Longlisted for the National Book Award Finalist for the Gotham Book Prize and the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize A Best Book of the Year at Kirkus, The Christian Science Monitor, Library Journal, and BuzzFeed What makes a life, Sam Waxworth sometimes wondered—self or circumstance? On the day Sam Waxworth arrives in New York to write for the Interviewer, a street-corner preacher declares that the world is coming to an end. A data journalist and recent media celebrity—he correctly forecast every outcome of the 2008 election—Sam knows a few things about predicting the future. But when projection meets reality, life gets complicated. His first assignment for the Interviewer is a profile of disgraced political columnist Frank Doyle, known to Sam for the sentimental works of baseball lore that first sparked his love of the game. When Sam meets Frank at Citi Field for the Mets’ home opener, he finds himself unexpectedly ushered into Doyle’s crumbling family empire. Kit, the matriarch, lost her investment bank to the financial crisis; Eddie, their son, hasn’t been the same since his second combat tour in Iraq; Eddie’s best friend from childhood, the fantastically successful hedge funder Justin Price, is starting to see cracks in his spotless public image. And then there’s Frank’s daughter, Margo, with whom Sam becomes involved—just as his wife, Lucy, arrives from Wisconsin. While their lives seem inextricable, none of them know how close they are to losing everything, including each other. Sweeping in scope yet meticulous in its construction, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts is a remarkable family portrait and a masterful evocation of New York City and its institutions. Over the course of a single baseball season, Christopher Beha traces the passing of the torch from the old establishment to the new meritocracy, exploring how each generation’s failure helped land us where we are today. Whether or not the world is ending, Beha’s characters are all headed to apocalypses of their own making.

“A terrific debut novel . . . Mountford’s parable of the voracious global economy reminds me of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.” —Jess Walter, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Cold Millions On his first assignment for a rapacious hedge fund, Gabriel embarks to Bolivia at the end of 2005 to ferret out insider information about the plans of the controversial president-elect. If Gabriel succeeds, he will get a bonus that would make him secure for life. Standing in his way are his headstrong mother, a survivor of Pinochet’s Chile, and Gabriel’s new love interest, the president’s passionate press liaison. Caught in a growing web of lies and questioning his own role in profiting from an impoverished people, Gabriel sets in motion a terrifying plan that could cost him the love of all those he holds dear. Set against the stunning mountainous backdrop of La Paz and interspersed with Bolivia’s sad history of stubborn survival, this examines the critical choices a young man makes as his world closes in on him. “Both of the book’s settings—desperately poor but proud La Paz, the world’s highest-altitude capital, and the world of go-go high finance, a realm about which Mountford clearly knows his stuff—are well rendered. The author is especially good at conveying the visceral and intellectual thrills of stock speculation/manipulation . . . smart, intricate, fast-paced.” —Kirkus Reviews “One of the most compelling and thought-provoking novels I’ve read in years.” —David Shields, author of Other People Winner of the Washington State Book Award

Tin House editors have assembled a dazzling anthology of work by established and emerging contemporary poets. Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House celebrates Tin HouseMagazine's commitment to publishing innovative contemporary poetry by both established and emerging poets. Tin House has established itself as one of the most exciting, eclectic, and popular literary magazines in America. The Village Voice declared that Tin House "may very well represent the future of literary magazines." This collection features work by Rae Armantrout, Frank Bidart, Billy Collins, Bei Dao, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Mark Doty, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Nick Flynn, Matthea Harvey, Terrance Hayes, Seamus Heaney, Lucia Perillo, D.A. Powell, Bin Ramke, Charles Simic, Wislawa Szymborska, C.K. Williams, and others.

BEST RESOURCE AVAILABLE FOR GETTING YOUR FICTION PUBLISHED For three decades, fiction writers have turned to Novel & Short Story Writer's Market to keep them up-to-date on the industry and help them get published. Whatever your genre or form, the 2010 edition of Novel & Short Story Writer's Market tells you who to contact and what to send them. In this edition you'll find: • Complete, up-to-date contact information for 1,200 book publishers, magazines and journals, literary agents, contests and conferences. • News with novelists such as Gregory Frost, Jonathan Mayberry, Carolyn Hart, Chelsea Cain, Mary Rosenblum, Brian Evenson and Patricia Briggs, plus interviews with four debut authors who share their stories and offer advice. • Nearly 200 pages of informative and inspirational articles on the craft and business of fiction, including pieces on a writing humor, satire, unsympathetic characters, and genre fiction; tips from editors and authors on how to get published; exercises to improve your craft; and more. • Features devoted to genre writing including romance, mystery, and speculative fiction. • And new this year: access to all Novel & Short Story Writer's Market listings in a searchable online database!

Twenty-four-year-old Janice Itwaru is an “uncle”—NYPD lingo for an undercover narcotics officer—and the heroine of the most exuberantand original cop novel in years. A New York City cop who can last eighteen months in Narcotics, without getting killed or demoted first, will automatically get promoted to detective. Undercover narc Janice Itwaru is at month seventeen. Ambitious, desperate for that promotion, she hits the sidewalks of Queens in her secondhand hoochie clothes, hoping to convince potential criminals—drug dealers, addicts, dummies, whomever—to commit a felony on her behalf. And things aren’t any easier back at the narco office, where she has to keep up with the bantering lies and inventively cruel pranks of her fellow uncles while coping with the ridiculous demands of her NYPD bosses. With an ailing mother at home, her cover nearly blown, quota pressures from her superiors, and rumors circulating that Internal Affairs has her unit under surveillance, Janice is running terribly short on luck as her promotion deadline approaches. Now she has to decide which evil to confront: the absurd bureaucrats at One Police Plaza, or the violent drug dealers who may already be on to her identity. Bursting with the glorious chaos of the New York City streets, Uncle Janice is both a deeply funny portrait of how undercover cops really talk and act, and a compelling story of their crazy, dangerous, and complicated lives.

In Climate Lyricism Min Hyoung Song articulates a climate change-centered reading practice that foregrounds how climate is present in most literature. Song shows how literature, poetry, and essays by Tommy Pico, Solmaz Sharif, Frank O’Hara, Ilya Kaminsky, Claudia Rankine, Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Richard Powers, and others help us to better grapple with our everyday encounters with climate change and its disastrous effects, which are inextricably linked to the legacies of racism, colonialism, and extraction. These works employ what Song calls climate lyricism—a mode of address in which a first-person “I” speaks to a “you” about how climate change thoroughly shapes daily life. The relationship between “I” and “you” in this lyricism, Song contends, affects the ways readers comprehend the world, fostering a model of shared agency from which it can become possible to collectively and urgently respond to the catastrophe of our rapidly changing climate. In this way, climate lyricism helps to ameliorate the sense of being overwhelmed and feeling unable to do anything to combat climate change.

Follows the adventures of detective Dave Robicheaux, who struggles with alcoholism and rage while fighting to protect lives in Katrina-devastated New Orleans.