Online Features 

Cover Artist: John Moore

Over a career spanning forty years, John Moore has been awarded twice by both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Endowment for the Arts. Moore’s work can be found in public collections nationwide, including The Art Institute of Chicago; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Neuberger Museum, Purchase, New York; The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Preview a selection of content from each genre of our Issue 49 - Fall 2025 . To read the work online, click on the title of the piece in the listing below.

Interview: Percival Everett

On the making of James

Percival Everett is an American author of over thirty novels, short story collections, and poetry collections. He is known for his diverse range of styles and subjects, often exploring themes of race, philosophy, and social commentary. He has received numerous accolades, including the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for his novel James (Doubleday, 2024), a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Fiction: Christine Sneed

Drifting Skiff

Along with past issues of Catamaran Literary Reader, Christine Sneed’s short stories have appeared in New England Review, Story, Boulevard, The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and other publications. Her most recent book is Direct Sunlight: Stories (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2023). She lives in Pasadena, California, and teaches creative writing courses for Northwestern University and Stanford Continuing Studies..

Nonfiction: Don Lago

The Gravity of Life on EartH: The findings of astronomer Vera Rubin

Don Lago is the author of Canyon and Cosmos: Searching for Human Identity in the Grand Canyon (University of Nevada Press, 2025). He lives in a cabin in the forest in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Poetry: Rebecca Foust

River

Rebecca Foust is the author of the books ONLY, Paradise Drive, All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song, and, in collaboration with artist Lorna Stevens, God, Seed: Poetry & Art about the Natural World. She has also published three chapbooks: The Unexploded Ordinance Bin, Dark Card, and Mom’s Canoe. A new chapbook, YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR: Love Poems, was runner up in the 2024 Backbone Press contest and was released in October 2024.

Translation: Henry Murger
translated from the French by Zack Rogow

The man with the Glove: Excerpt from The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era

Henry Murger (1822–1861) was one of the leading writers of the Romantic movement. His most famous book is Scenes of Bohemian Life, source of Puccini’s La Bohème. Murger died a tragic death at age thirty-eight, hastened by a hemorrhagic state from purpura, an underlying condition which turns the skin a purplish hue. A statue of Murger stands in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris. This excerpt is from the book The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era (Black Widow Press, 2025).

Zack Rogow (translation and adaptation) was cowinner of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Award for Earthlight by André Breton (Sun and Moon Press, 1993; revised edition Black Widow Press, 2015), and he also translated Breton’s Arcanum 17 (Green Integer, 2004). Rogow won the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for his translation of George Sand’s novel Horace (Mercury House, 1995). He also cotranslated Shipwrecked on a Traffic Island and Other Previously Untranslated Gems by Colette (State University of New York Press, 2014).

Issue 49-Fall, 2025

Cover & Table of Contents