Dear reader,
Welcome to Issue 113!
If you’re a regular reader of these letters, you’ll already know that I try to keep the focus on the contents of the issue in these letters and off myself, but—and I really hope you won’t mind—this issue is a milestone for me: it’s my 100th issue with the magazine.
Over the last 100 issues, it has been my great pleasure to have worked with some of the most innovative, interesting, and just plain brilliant writers writing in America today. I feel fortunate to have had this opportunity, and I hope you’ll join in my own personal celebration by reading this issue and sharing its contents far and wide. If there’s something here you love, please tell others about it.
And there’s much here to love, reader. As befits the season, there is plenty of growth in this issue, not all of it healthy, there are cruelties and kindnesses, scams, systemic failures, lusts, backroads, the bucolic, the international, families coming together and coming apart, fantasies of escape and fantasies of reckoning and reconciliation. It’s something I’m immensely proud to have played some small part in bringing to you, and something I very much hope you’ll enjoy as much as we do.
Thank you so much for stopping by!
Sincerely,
Gabriel Blackwell