Vol. I · A Literary Gathering Room
Currents
A drawing-room of letters from the literary deep.
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
— Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak, 27 January 1904
Currents is the press’s gathering room — an ongoing series of short essays on the writers we keep returning to (Joyce, Woolf, Fitzgerald, O’Connor, Hemingway, and the long company of writers they made possible), on questions of craft, and on the books we find worth passing along. Newest entries appear first. Each is a small conversation, not a definitive judgment.
What you will find here:
- Reflections on the writers we return to — the classics, the moderns, the rooms they made.
- Notes on the writing life — questions of craft, problems of form.
- Editorial counsel — advice from the desk on revision, voice, and patience.
- Recommended reading — books we believe deserve a careful audience.
- Letters from readers — your own thoughts, selected and lightly edited.
By writing to Currents, you grant Silver Current Press a non-exclusive, perpetual right to edit your letter for length and clarity and to publish it on this site and in related Silver Current Press materials, with the attribution you specify. You confirm the work is your own and retain copyright in it. We do not pay contributors; selection is its own honor.
RECENT ESSAYS
From the Gathering Room
Vol. I · No. III · MMXXVI
The Word That Comes Back
By The Editors · August 2026
There is a kind of poem that turns on a single word — a word so ordinary it might have gone unnoticed the first time it was spoken. Marie Howe does this in "What the Living Do," where the word is lovely. Frank O'Hara does it in "The Day Lady Died," where the word is practically. What these poems know is that recurrence, in the domestic register, is how grief actually behaves.
Vol. I · No. IV · MMXXVI
The Sentence That Refuses to Name Itself
By The Editors · July 2026
There is a moment, near the end of any great short story, when the writer could name the thing and does not. The scene arrives at its climax. The reader understands. And then the sentence turns aside, refuses the noun, and gives you a curtain, a window, a train ticket, a shoe. Chekhov taught modern short fiction this move. Every writer who has written a serious short story since has been trying, one way or another, to earn it.
Vol. I · No. V · MMXXVI
The Grandmother in the Doorway
By The Editors · June 2026
Some writers spend a career going somewhere. Others spend a career coming back to the same place. Faulkner did the second. Woolf did the second. Marilynne Robinson has done the second for forty years and won every prize a writer can win for the going and never-leaving. The recurring figure — the grandmother in the doorway, the lighthouse at the end of the water — is not a failure of imagination. It may be the most disciplined thing a writer can do.
Vol. I · No. I · MMXXVI
Fitzgerald, at the Edge of a Sentence
By The Editors · April 2026
The ending of Babylon Revisited is one of the great quiet endings in American fiction. Fitzgerald, who rewrote the final paragraph more than once, refuses the consolations a lesser writer would have reached for. There is no flourish, no rounding image. The widowed Charlie Wales is left alone in a Paris bar at Christmas, and the prose declines to comfort him.
Vol. I · No. II · MMXXVI
A Book Worth Knowing
By The Editors · February 2026
If you have not read William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, set aside the hundred and thirty-five pages it will ask of you and give them gladly. It is the story of a murder on an Illinois farm in 1921 and of a boy who, fifty years later, is still trying to write down what he should have said to another boy at school.
Currents is curated by James Mulhern. Selected entries appear quarterly. Letters not selected are read with care and gratitude. The Letters from Readers feature will appear once correspondence is received.
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