Although he bore plenty of battle scars, Captain Hook was a good-looking guy, and he treated Mom like a queen. I can see now why she was so into him, but at fourteen, I was mortified by my stepdad, and it wasn’t just the crocodile. He was forced to wear the standard issue postal uniform during the week, but on his days off he dressed in knee-length breeches, stockings, a red frock coat, and a wide-brimmed hat with a plume. His hair was even longer than mine, and it curled into black ringlets. My mom never seemed to notice the things that set her husband apart from other people—she saw only the man who’d rescued her from a lonely, loveless existence.

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We begin 2013 with our first redesign in decades. Take a look, and read Ann Fabian on the sad life of pioneering herpetologist Mary Cynthia Dickerson and Zhanna Vaynberg on growing up between cultures, along with fiction by Cody Peace Adams, Kim Adrian, Morris Collins, Jen Fawkes, Stephanie Friedman, and William Kelly Woolfitt; a review of Witold Gombrowicz by Piotr Florczyk; and poetry by Marianne Boruch.

From the Desert Wars,” is a special section of startling and deeply felt poetry written by American soldiers fresh from Iraq and Afghanistan,“trying to make sense of things,” including work by Benjamin Busch, Clint Garner, Bruce Lack, Hugh Martin, and Patrick Whalen.

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For a special issue on translation—in the broadest sense of the word—we welcome stories, poems, and essays that either exemplify translation as practice or meditate on translation as phenomenon.

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In 1772, the twenty-six-year-old violinmaker Henry Whiteside began to build a lighthouse on a pile of rocks twenty miles off the coast of Pembrokeshire, Wales, called the Smalls. His design was unusual; the light perched on top of eight oak piers like the head of a stiff-legged octopus. Rather than making a solid base, Whiteside reasoned, he would let the force of the waves pass through the structure. But when the waves did so, the living quarters swayed violently; one visitor reported that a full bucket of water was half empty by the time he left. The force of the storm made each thing—bucket, glass, stove, table—resonant; it bent the lighthouse, shaping it into an instrument of music.

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Tung-Hui Hu’s lyrical take on nineteenth-century life in a lighthouse off the coast of Wales, Craig McDaniel on color and perspective in Bonnard, Molly McQuade on Wim Wender’s tribute to Pina Bausch, Jeffrey Meyers on Thomas Mann in America.

Fiction by Mimi Herman, Sharona Muir, Dina Nayeri, Dalia Rosefeld, Charles Antin, Bipin Aurora, and Donald Yates.

Poetry by Angie Estes, Patricia Clark, Chris Cunningham, Sarah Messer, Nance Van Winckel, and Mark Wunderlich.

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