ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. – Perhaps nothing is more fraught than family. Even the most solipsistic among us can never wholly escape its pull. The monk, the hermit, the orphan, the runaway who renounces his parents and changes his name. The daughter estranged from her mother, the son who never knew his father. All of us, whether or not we love and embrace our families, are stamped DNA-deep by kinship. As a result, narratives of family form the bedrock of so much literature. In Conjunctions:57, Kin, the latest issue of the innovative literary magazine published by Bard College, leading contemporary writers and poets gather to address the familial bond from a variety of angles in nearly 400 pages of fiction, essays, and poems from, among others, Rae Armantrout, Ann Beattie, Elizabeth Hand, Noy Holland, Robert Kelly, Rick Moody, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Orner, Octavio Paz (translated from Spanish by Eliot Weinberger), and Karen Russell.

“While it was tempting from time to time to expand our theme a little to include friendships—kindred spirits who can sometimes feel closer than flesh-and-blood relatives—in the end we hewed as close as we could to family itself, to kinfolk,” writes Conjunctions editor, novelist, and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow. “Because family, however we define its boundaries, is so central to our lives, the extremes of human emotion are necessarily found in its precincts—from nurturing to violence, from loyalty to deceit, from murderous hatred to the kind of affection that crosses the border toward unshakable love.”

In addition to the writers mentioned above, Kin also features new work from Rachel Tzvia Back, Sarah Blackman, Can Xue (translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping), Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud (translated by Edward Gauvin), Robert Clark, Scott Geiger, Karen Hays, Christie Hodgen, A D Jameson, Diane Greco Josefowicz, Clark Knowles, Gracie Leavitt, Miranda Mellis, Micaela Morrissette, Andrew Mossin, Aurelie Sheehan, Sallie Tisdale, and Andrew R. Touhy.