Retro Five

In Retro Five, the acclaimed literary magazine Joyland has collected fourteen of its editors' favorites stories from the last year. Annabel Graham explores scars left and secrets found in a teenage girl's first summer in New York; Olga Breydo refracts the American ritual of homecoming through the eyes of a young Ukrainian immigrant in Missouri. C.E. Hyun tells the tale of a Norse god reborn as a young woman living in Venice, and childhood friends reconnect at Los Angeles's Chateau Marmont in Duncan Birmingham's tale. Some themes are universal: Lillian Weber focuses on complications between roommates, and Michele Lyn King sharply depicts the ghost of an ex-girlfriend hovering over a nascent relationship at an everytown-college.