Boulevard Nos. 98 & 99 debuts our craft interview feature discussing the genesis of inspiration, urgency, real-world characters, the impossibility of attention, and more with Nathan Englander. Featuring Joyce Carol Oates’s intense yet subtle fiction tackles grooming and Stockholm syndrome; poetry by Morgan Parker; Sommer Schaefer’s whimsically haunting story illustrates the dangers of blindly accepting love from one’s doorstep; Robbie Maakestad finds some humor and cheeseburgers in the tribulations of his recurrent lung collapse; Judith Padow recalls Jewish existential anxiety and communist panic during the Holocaust and Cold War, and Kirtan Nautiyal relates his father’s immigrant experience to the forgotten Indian scientist Dr. Yellapragada Subbarow and his discovery of the crucial chemotherapy drug methotrexate.

Also featuring the 2017 Poetry Contest for Emerging Poets winning entry: Elizabeth Hoover’s group of three poems on the art of listening while female, Lolita, lies, and more. Plus, fantastic and striking cover art by the new-to-Boulevard Rene Lynch!

And much more! Fiction and essays by J. T. Barbarese, John Dalton, Karin Lin-Greenberg, Jared Silvia, Lee Upton, and Andrew Weinstein. Poetry by Lea Anderson, Marta Balcewicz, Shauna Barbosa, Elizabeth Eagle, Melissa Ginsburg, Jessica Greenbaum, Shen Haobo translated by Liang Yujing, W. J. Herbert, Steve McDonald, Joshua McKinney, Orlando Ricardo Menes, David Moolten, Doug Ramspeck, Floyd Skloot, Brian Sneeden, Chelsea Wagenaar, Maceo J. Whitaker, and Frank Wilson.