An Anatomy of Roads: The Quest Issue — Bradford Morrow

Leaving home is a dangerous business. Whether it's to walk across the street or travel to another continent, one never returns the same. Conjunctions: 44, An Anatomy of Roads: The Quest Issue, explores in fiction and poetry the fascinating, complex process of defamiliarization as the ultimate path to knowing oneself. John Barth contributes an astonishing, hilarious novella entitled, “I've Been Told: A Story's Story,” which may be the ultimate quest narrative in that the story of a quester is narrated by the quest itself. Young Bristish author and Booker Award finalist for his first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, Jon McGregor offers a story of a distraught man who travels to an unnamed island in search of his lost father. David Schuman's story “Miss” is an eerie modern desert journey in which a man and his daughter, who is convinced that she is a cat, encounters the mother who abandoned him working in a Twilight Zone-like diner in the middle of nowhere. “Kronia,” by celebrated fantasy writer Elizabeth Hand, details a love story that may or may not have actually happened over the course of decades around the world. Joanna Scott, Carole Maso, Rikki Ducornet, Nathaniel Mackey, Forrest Gander and some 24 other writers contribute to this journey of the mind.