Emery: You want to know my secrets? What lies beneath the pretty? The scars I can’t let anyone see? The scars tied to my secrets? On the outside I appear normal. Some might even say perfect. They say that I’m a pretty girl. They say I should be happy. They say that I have nothing to be angry about. That I’m popular. A cheerleader. That I’m perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. But all they see is what’s on the outside. On the inside I’m raw, open, bleeding. Scars that can’t seem to heal the wounds. Carrying dark secrets about who I really am. How afraid I am to tell the truth. And it’s slowly killing me. Ryler: Tattoos. Piercing. Scars. The guy who can’t speak. Gothic freak. Mute. Punk. I’ve heard it all. They say that I’m probably dangerous. They say people should stay away from me. They say. They say. They say. But who are they anyway? To decide what I am. They don’t know what’s hidden beneath the scars. Beneath the piercings and tattoos. The secrets I keep hidden beneath the silence. Maybe if they knew, they wouldn’t fear me so much. Then again, maybe they’d fear me more.

Sports fandom--often more than religious, political, or regional affiliation--determines how millions of Americans define themselves. In We Average Unbeautiful Watchers, Noah Cohan examines contemporary sports culture to show how mass-mediated athletics are in fact richly textured narrative entertainments rather than merely competitive displays. While it may seem that sports narratives are "written" by athletes and journalists, Cohan demonstrates that fans are not passive consumers but rather function as readers and writers who appropriate those narratives and generate their own stories in building their sense of identity. Critically reading stories of sports fans' self-definition across genres, from the novel and the memoir to the film and the blog post, We Average Unbeautiful Watchers recovers sports games as sites where fan-authors theorize interpretation, historicity, and narrative itself. Fan stories demonstrate how unscripted sporting entertainments function as identity-building narratives--which, in turn, enhances our understanding of the way we incorporate a broad range of texts into our own life stories. Building on the work of sports historians, theorists of fan behavior, and critics of American literature, Cohan shows that humanistic methods are urgently needed for developing nuanced critical conversations about athletics. Sports take shape as stories, and it is scholars in the humanities who can best identify how they do so--and why that matters for American culture more broadly.

Editor: winter 1939-autumn 1941 J.C. Ransom.

Poetry. Steve Langan's brilliant first book is full of passion suffused with irony, poems cagily built to deconstruct sentimentality by using self-consciousness as a kind of comic foil. But for all the poet's clever feints and evasions, at the core of the work beats the heart of a romantic. Langan's methods are luminously impressionistic, and the poems percolate with image and materiality, inflection and the full-throated music of language. Freezing glitters with the distant light (or explosions of inner light) of a hundred small moments colliding where perception meets the self in the "unbeautiful city."