An installment in John T. Edge’s column, Local Fare. She was a genius, I’ve come to recognize, at recasting defeats as glorious spectacles. Faced with small-town ignorance, fearful of what small-town boredom might wrest from her, she did her best… by John T. Edge | Sep, 2019

My Mother’s Catfish Stew

A feature essay from the Spring 2020 issue. I moved to Texas in 2017 and returned often to Dilley. When I would chat with residents—after a city council meeting, at the nail salon, before a cook-off—they’d ask if I was… by Emily Gogolak | Mar, 2020

An Intersection at the End…

A feature essay from the Spring 2020 issue. I wasn’t sure how to explain to a rising high-school junior why I’d followed her and her classmates to Belize. I’d met Pierre-Floyd a few months before during a tour of Frederick… by Casey Parks | Mar, 2020

Sense of Strength

A short story from the Spring 2020 issue I tell him goodbye and go wander around the beauty section in Dillard’s. I find the perfume like what I’m wearing on display and I spray some more on. I find a… by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips | Feb, 2020

The Virgin

A feature essay from the Spring 2020 issue. History is, in part, the memories we choose to protect and reinforce, to ensure their longevity and influence. In Thibodaux’s protected memory, sugarcane has endured, plantations have endured, Confederate heroes have endured—but… by Rosemary Westwood | Mar, 2020

Persons Unknown

A Points South essay from the Spring 2020 issue When we weren’t whizzing through intersections, I was trying to read road signs, thinking that their letters, dimly lit by our headlights, would give me some kind of orientation on this… by Malinda Maynor Lowery | Mar, 2020

Career Girl Meets Rock Star

A featured short story from the Spring 2020 issue. She stopped short. The dogs would have passed without noticing her, but Seth had to give them a parting yap. In a second they wheeled around and came straight at her,… by Ben Fountain | Mar, 2020

Cane Creek

 A Letter from the Editor, Spring 2020. Over the years, I have come to admire a certain kind of story that the Oxford American, as a quarterly magazine untethered from the demands of a rapid news cycle, is especially well… by Eliza Borné | Mar, 2020

The Messy Middle

We would like to hear from you.  The magazine will begin publishing letters to the editor in the fall issue and going forward. If you would like to respond to a story published in the magazine, we welcome your letter. by Oxford American | Jun, 2019

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The By and By

In the Tonnara

October 18, 2017

An installment in our weekly story series, The By and By. 

For all we romanticize the notion of “work” in America, and as much as the politicians shill for it, the daily life of a laborer is the first thing to slip the collective memory. Instead, our children are taken to visit the mansion, the cathedral, or the art museum where the dirty money was poured. The factories corrode. The roof falls in. The weather comes.

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