In Retro Five, the acclaimed literary magazine Joyland has collected fourteen of its editors’ favorites stories from the last year. Annabel Graham explores scars left and secrets found in a teenage girl’s first summer in New York; Olga Breydo refracts the American ritual of homecoming through the eyes of a young Ukrainian immigrant in Missouri. C.E. Hyun tells the tale of a Norse god reborn as a young woman living in Venice, and childhood friends reconnect at Los Angeles’s Chateau Marmont in Duncan Birmingham’s tale. Some themes are universal: Lillian Weber focuses on complications between roommates, and Michele Lyn King sharply depicts the ghost of an ex-girlfriend hovering over a nascent relationship at an everytown-college.
