JULY ISSUE

Your flame blue eyes Are not like mine, Or are they? Are they, Lawrence?
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The Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, lovingly dubbed “Alcatraz of the South,” is the largest maximum security prison in the United States. Its 18,000 acres of bucolic farmland at the end of a 20-mile, two-lane back road are home to roughly 5,200 inmates, about 86 percent of whom are violent offenders, and 52 percent...
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If fashion is a joining of art and craft, photographer Bell Soto rides that seam all the way down to the hem. Using tools as elemental as shadow and light, he conjures beauty from the rawest of subjects, producing final compositions that all but glow with an elegant and ineffable fire. Thanks to Bell’s...
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The fall of the Iron Curtain ushered in an era of heady, unprecedented freedom for the residents of former Soviet states. With it, however, came disquieting uncertainty, as the body politic struggled to reconcile decades of repression with their newfound liberties. Life was assuredly not all flowing Coca-Cola and crisp Levi’s blue jeans, and...
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When it comes to the essentials, there’s no substitute for quality. That’s why when GUTFIRE!… ahem… misplaces the company helicopter, we speed dial the Sikorsky boys for their latest fully armed Black Hawk Civilian model (what’s nice is the mahogany interior paneling). When we’re in dire straits for a new batch of team tuxedos,...
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by Maura KellyThe writing of Maura Kelly is a wonderfully impossible cocktail of grit and sweetness, perspiration and perfume. Discontent with the banality of feminine literary norms, she creates instead protagonistas who are far more real and far less predictable, evoked from an emotional concentrate potent enough to stagger even the most stolid of...
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In the 1990’s, British literature was rent asunder by the brutally honest voices of two Scottish writers: Alan Warner and Irvine Welsh. Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995) and Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) mark a new direction in Anglo-Celtic fiction, a fresh branch on a literary tree that for too long was watered almost exclusively by English...
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