Lisa Locascio
Period sex finally gets its due as dramatic device in Mary-Beth Hughes’s emotionally raw but ultimately elegant novel The Loved Ones. The scene in question opens, as all do in this novel, in medias res, with unhinged rake Nick Devlin in a hotel room with “a pretty girl who seems to have bled all over the bedding.” By the time this passage arrives, near the middle of the book, the dissembling of the Devlin family has already been established: perpetually moving between the East Coast of the United States and England, each member copes with repressed pain through forms of 
From the grand ’Nam narratives of ’70s cinema to the works of creative-writing-syllabus mainstays like Tim O’Brien and Robert Olen Butler, representations of Vietnam and the war we staged there are some of our most indelible and critically renowned cultural products. The subgenre’s Frankenstein face—equal parts sentimental fetish, idealistic fantasy, and violent reportage, a mixture as dissonant and complex as the War itself—crystallizes in Butler’s story “Mid-Autumn,” from the 1992 collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, in which a Vietnamese GI bride offers a blend of schmaltz, Orientalism, and pathos in a doomed love story that celebrates the 
In 1999, I spent my eighth-grade spring break with my mother, visiting my aunt in Rockville, Maryland. In a never-repeated experiment, my father and younger sister went on a separate vacation to Disney World. While they rode the Tower of Terror, we spent our days on the clean, empty Metro as my mom, who had lived on O Street during her first marriage in the 1970s, showed me around the city. One afternoon we went to the Tower Records in Foggy Bottom, where I found Jesus Saves by Darcey Steinke. Its yellow cover bore a black line drawing of a