From the Editor…

The sixth issue of Socrates on the Beach contains six pieces that have certain affinities, that play off each other and make up a constellation of strong feelings pressed into hard-fought-for sentences.

The fiction side begins with the late Lars Ahlin, a Swedish writer too little translated into English. “Comes Home and Is Nice,” translated by Tobias Freeman, charts an all too familiar conjugal scene, until it gloriously breaks away into anti-epiphany. Pete Segall’s “History as Told in a Series of Definitions” is a mordant and slaphappy vision of the world—Barthelme by way of Davenport—utterly unlike most current fiction. Nicholas John Turner’s excerpt from the novel The Soft Castle may be dilatory, but its motion is its soul, spiraling forward and back in rich language as two inspectors examine a car crash.

Three essays round out the issue. First, Seph Murtagh’s glorious “Black Diamond: A Retrospective” begins with a drink, the Alexander, and branches out to US railway history in Ithaca, Native Americans, and many other topics before landing on a present-day bike path. Mairead Small Staid’s glimmering, questing piece “Cities and Memory” centers on memories of Florence and Michelangelo’s David, bending time in bracing sentences with a road map from Calvino’s traveler. Finally, Jeff Wood’s epic cri de coeur “Revenge of the Real: 0.00°, 0.00°” issues out of the invasion of Ukraine and multiple other world concussions—in a baroque style, he asks how the world is the world.

Certain spellings from across the oceans have been retained.

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

Greg Gerke