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September 2023

News & Notes

Exploring Awe

Selections from the Archives

September 28, 2023

Upcoming Readers Write Deadlines

Fantasy, Taste, and Uniforms

September 21, 2023

The Other Side of the Portal

Speculative Fiction in The Sun

David Mahaffey, Associate Editor • September 15, 2023
All news & notes
The Sun Interview

No Small Wonder

Dacher Keltner On The Science Of Awe

Emotions aren’t discrete bubbles. They are blending into each other all the time. You might be feeling awe and wonder at the miracle of life, and also realizing that we all die, which perhaps moves you closer to terror. In our work we try to find what’s true in it all.

By Mark Leviton
Fiction

Please Be Patient, Student Driver

My classmates were all getting their driver’s licenses. Like any of us had anywhere important to go. They drove cars their parents had gifted them, either a hand-me-down or a brand-new lease. I was the last without a provisional license and the only one without a car parked outside Shane Yamamoto’s house.

By Joseph Han
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A Face In Judgment

A young man stands at the lectern: nineteen years old, athletic, thick black hair down to his shoulders. I’ll call him Marco. Today my job is to decide whether to send him to prison.

By Devin Odell
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen

We are thirteen, my cousin Sally and me — girls on our own, on the roam, under the big skies of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. We’re here for the summer, living in a trailer that my aunt Helen has rented as part of a lengthy effort to seduce her law-school professor Phil, who lives next door.

By Leah Rutherford
Readers Write

Privacy

A coded diary, a box of letters, a closed bedroom door

By Our Readers