Issue 100, Spring 2018

Announcing the Oxford American’s 100th Issue!

Our 100th issue includes a new original cover painting by Wayne White, an essay on the Falcon Heavy from National Book Award Finalist Lauren Groff, and a special revival of the OA’s long-running Writing on Writing department, for which seven writers contributed essays celebrating their mentors. A milestone issue that commemorates our history and looks with excitement toward the literary future, we hope our 100th will do what editor Eliza Borné reminds us the OA has always done at its best, and “serve for readers as its own kind of guiding light.”

Contributors include: Nikki Giovanni, Kevin Brockmeier, Randall Kenan, Wendell Berry, Tania James, Tayari Jones, Tift Merritt, and many more.

---

---

Editor’s Letter: 100!, by Eliza Borné

POINTS SOUTH

It Had to be Memphis, by Benjamin Hedin

A Good Job, a poem by Nikki Giovanni

Medusa, a story by Tania James

Black Pearl, by Lolis Eric Elie

Eggs, a story by Mary Miller

Gun, Under Glass, by Alan Huffman 

Reading the Soil, by Christopher Cox

The Same Mountaintop, by Laine Kaplan-Levenson 

The Fifth Sunday, a story by Clyde Edgerton

Local Fare: The Question of Dinner, by John T. Edge

FEATURES

Sabbaths
Poems by Wendell Berry

Night, Sleep, Death and the Stars
Waiting for the Falcon Heavy
by Lauren Groff

Resurrection Hardware
a story by Randall Kenan 

False Morels
A story by Jessi Lewis

The Cost of Certainty
Evangelicalism in Trump’s America
by Molly McCully Brown

The Stephanies
A story by Thomas Pierce

WRITING ON WRITING

This Is Your Life, by Tayari Jones

Five Glimpses of Donald Harington, by Kevin Brockmeier

Shit, We're All Consequences of Something, by Crystal Wilkinson

My Secret Sharer, by Tift Merritt

Frederick Barthelme and "The 39 Steps," by Pia Z. Ehrhardt

Write Like Hell, by Bronwen Dickey

Read My World, by Jamey Hatley

OMNIVORE

Perfectly Boring
Mississippi, murder, and William Eggleston’s “Red Ceiling”
by Will Stephenson

The Kingdom of the Other
On seeing what is to be seen
by James Dickey
Introduction by Tim Gautreaux
Notes by Casey Clabough

Cooking with Chris: 
The Echo of an Echo Is an Echo's Etcetera
by Chris Offutt

 

Art by:  Wayne White, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Isabella Weston, Tom Martin, Lorna Simpson, Ayo Scott, Jennifer Shaw, John Chiara, Gwynne Johnson, Didier William, Lauren Pond, Kerry James Marshall, Irene Imfeld, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Laura Plageman, Liza Ryan, Jonathan Gardner, Eleanor Davis, William Eggleston, Amy Friend, Douglas Bourgeois

Cover: “100!” (2018), by Wayne White for the Oxford American