200 pages.

The Winter 2012 issue offers a special Noir section, including fiction from E.G. Willy (paranoia and gangbanging settles over the old neighborhood—in the suburbs), Dawna Kemper (a woman and a baby race into the desert night, but to what end?), Andy Stewart (a petty, envious music instructor is baffled by a charming, good-hearted peer in ways he couldn’t have anticipated), and a poem from Lucas Howell (bloody treachery befalls the coyote).

Plus these stories:

• Ron Carlson’s “Line from a Movie”—finding some truth, and a true friend, in Hollywood (selected as a Notable by Best American Short Stories)
• Vanessa Veselka’s “Christopher Hitchens”—on a mother looking to rid herself of all her beliefs
• Earle McCartney’s “Sawmill”—on a family man adrift in his chilly small town
• Jennifer duBois’s “The Heathen Army”—on a teen boy and his father, wounded in different ways
• Bruce McKay’s “The Wheel at the Cistern”—two brothers on a long walk through the fields, extinction on their minds

Verse from John W. Evans, Carolyn Miller, Marci Vogel, Elyse Fenton, C.M. Davidson, and Jane Wong. Rick Barot’s essay on the particular power of Giorgio Morandi’s painting “Natura Morta,” and artist Wendy MacNaughton’s pen-and-ink history of a pier in San Francisco and the neighborhood that’s formed around it. And introducing Chaney Kwak—and what might be the best Christmas story you’ve read in ages (complete with over-the-top holiday decorations, furtive roadside sex, and a precocious would-be hustler).

Plus the work of artist Jane Hambleton on the covers.