This month's issue

Announcements

01.14.2010

The Sun needs a Digital-Media Director in our Chapel Hill, North Carolina, office. Click here for details.

12.18.2009

Join Sun readers, authors, and staff — including editor and publisher Sy Safransky — for one of our lively weekends of conversation, reflection, and inspiration. Click here for details.

10.07.2009

Austin Bunn’s short story “Everything, All At Once” [June 2008] has been awarded the Pushcart Prize, which honors exceptional writing from America’s small presses. Click here for details.

10.06.2009

David James Duncan’s essay “Cherish This Ecstasy” [July 2008] was selected to appear in The Best American Essays 2009 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Click here for details.

09.09.2009

Krista Bremer, an associate publisher at The Sun, has won a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, which honors women writers of “unusual talent and promise in the early stages of their writing careers.” Click here for details.

Favorites

from the archives

The Sun Interview

Busted

Dean Baker On The Price We're Still Paying For The Housing Bubble

by Anna Blackshaw

“Markets are a useful tool. Raving against them is like raving against the wheel: you can either do bad things with the wheel, or you can do great things with the wheel. The point is not to get rid of the market; the point is to structure the market in a way that benefits society as a whole.”

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Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Go Fly A Kite

by Frances Lefkowitz

I was on a trip back home to northern California — part work, part vacation — and I had a terrible head cold. My research for a magazine article on the wine country north of San Francisco had brought me to a chilly town on the edge of the San Andreas Fault, a place populated by a combination of wealthy tourists, ranch hands, and hippie holdouts. There, alongside the gift shops, the feed store, and the yoga studio, I stumbled across an herbal apothecary with a hand-painted sign that read, “Garden of Eden.” I stepped into this garden to buy some echinacea to supplement the Sudafed and Tylenol I was already taking. (When feeling this low, I discriminate against no potential cure.) The shopkeeper — whose long, graying brown hair identified her as one of the holdouts — watched me peruse her shelves, then asked, with a surprising French accent, what my symptoms were.

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Poetry

Selected Poems

by Brian Doyle
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Readers Write

Borrowing

by Our Readers

I have no children. I’ve been contentedly single for most of my childbearing years, and I haven’t really wanted kids. People have told me I’d make a good mother, but being good at something and wanting to do it are two different things. A few years ago I found out that I suffer from endometriosis, the top cause of infertility in women, so I probably couldn’t get pregnant even if I tried.

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In This Issue

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Sy Safransky’s
Notebook

Tomorrow Norma and I celebrate the twenty-eighth anniversary of our first night together. That’s not such a long time, really, considering how long it takes to learn to love another person; considering that, even as you’re learning to love her, she’s changing, you’re changing, and so is everything around you; considering that getting it wrong can teach you as much, or more, than getting it right — but there’s a huge price to pay for that kind of education, and it’s awfully easy to go broke.

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Sunbeams

Money is a dream. It is a piece of paper on which is imprinted in invisible ink the dream of all the things it will buy, all the trinkets and all the power over others.

David T. Bazelon

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Letter to the Editor

If you’re thinking about writing us a letter, give in to the temptation.

WRITE