From the Editor…

The fourth issue of Socrates on the Beach is special for many reasons, not the least of which is we’re all still here. It’s an honor to publish the beginning of William H. Gass’s last completed book, Baroque Prose, which concentrates on Gass’s most cherished subject: the sentence. Yet this is a luminous, ambidextrous work: part history, philology, and literary criticism, concentrating, in this section, on John Donne. Grant Maierhofer’s powerful “Notes on the Act of Writing” pairs well with it, as it carries a more contemporary response (and examples) to the heard and unheard harmonics of the sentence, but in a no less stimulating manner.

In another vein there are two other essays interested in differing vectors of experience. Zack Finch’s “The History of a Jump” is a raw, emotional journey through many relationships, while, at the same time, it wonderfully nestles up against some necessary art. John Haskell’s exquisite “Five Miles High” is ostensibly an exploration of a 1962 film with Sophia Loren and Anthony Perkins, until it starts to dive into questions of love while casting a certain shadowy inscape.

The fiction side of the issue contains two stalwart pieces. Anna DeForest’s short story “Family Meeting” is a rich work full of humor and pathos that enlivens as it simultaneously puts one under its unique spell. Emily Hall’s excerpt from The Longcut is an uncanny beginning to a novel that defies easy categorization and offers certain delicacies only great art can provide.

Thank you for visiting. I hope you will enjoy these works.

Greg Gerke