Elegy and promise stand side by side in this, the thirty fourth issue of your favorite Quarterly. Eight talented authors once again give you glimpses of worlds both familiar and alien, moving backwards and forwards in time and space, from Louisiana & Chicago, to a dusty settlement and abandoned house that bring new flavors to our tired notions of the apocalypse. The women and girls in these stories, like the authors that created them, are balancing old and new, grudges and hope, life and death. May we all learn from their journeys, their wisdom, and their folly.