“I don’t care what Bob Dylan said,” Michael writes in Unsolicited Advice. “I say do think twice—at least twice.” He was never not one for doubling back.

In June of 2009, I began work at the Gold Street office of Electric Literature, a publication conceived as an anthology of five stories issued three or four times a year.

In “Backyard,” the first of two stories in Sam Alden’s recent New Construction, a radical commune in a southern-seeming town must sort through tensions when one of its members—a young woman suffering from an unspecified sexual trauma—begins behaving exactly like a dog: going around on all-fours, barking, and antagonizing the communally kept chickens in the backyard.

In a small cabin with low ceilings a short walk uphill from the Homer Noble farmhouse, Robert Frost is reported to have spent a great many of his later summers in Vermont.

Song, return, repetition, claims of ancestral knowledge, and scandal: each figure has prominent elements in Adrienne Celt’s debut novel, The Daughters. Lulu, an opera performer descended from generations of female singers, several of whom occupy her living memory, is at the center of this feature, and it is a center to which the narrative loops again and again, enacting a sort of eternal return of its own via Lulu’s sinuous reflections.

The band hailed from upstate. Davis heard them for the first time underground one morning at 34th Street Station, a few months after he arrived in the city. He was living in the back of a British expat’s apartment, a space accessible only through a hobbit-sized door from the bathroom off the main stairwell.

In Strohm’s opinion, the painting of Chaucer before the king contains an invented scene, a folk fantasy imagined retroactively some time after the poet’s death. And the king? Well, that’s Richard II. At least it was the king until somebody got it in mind to scratch his resemblance out, so that what reached us over the course of the centuries is Chaucer reading his work to a royal audience, at the center of which sits a faceless head wearing a crown.

“Everyone moves, carries stuff, backpacks, gym bags, but mostly some idea of themselves."

If the quality of Hollywood fare is taken as a fair reading of the nation’s state of mind, then maybe there is meaning in how pervasive the corporate blockbuster model has become: all or nothing, boom or bust, like a desperate gambler deep in the hole and betting his last thread of clothing on the success of this one prospect and no other—the whole time denying there is any gamble at all.