Reading, the editor Emily Stokes suggests in her introduction, is one of the most mysterious and pleasurable pastimes we have — and this summer issue makes a compelling case. Fiction arrives from Shuang Xuetao, whose "God's Arrow," translated by Jeremy Tiang and appearing here in its first English-language print publication, takes its name from a mythical weapon: hold in your mind what you want to happen, and it will come true. Lucy Ellmann's "MT" launches itself at the reader as a sixteen-page catalogue of male collective harm, relentless and darkly comic; Chigozie Obioma's "The Yellow Leaf" follows a Nigerian couple newly arrived in Italy, each trapped in a different way. Frederick Seidel contributes new poetry. The cover — a broken rainbow by artist Alex Da Corte, lifted and reworked from the cover of Mariah Carey's 1999 album — sets the tone: something familiar, something fractured, something that keeps receding just as you think you've reached it.