In this episode, Lea Carpenter reads her story “Candy Cane” from the Summer 2019 issue of the Sewanee Review.

Lea Carpenter is the author of Eleven Days (Knopf, 2013) and Red, White, Blue (Knopf, 2018). She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton and has an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was valedictorian. She is a Contributing Editor at Esquire and wrote the screenplay for Mile 22, a film about CIA’s Special Activities Division, directed by Peter Berg and starring Mark Wahlberg. She lives in New York.

Founded in 1892 by the teacher and critic William Peterfield Trent, the Sewanee Review is America’s oldest continuously published literary quarterly. Many of the twentieth century’s great writers, including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Wallace Stevens, Saul Bellow, Katherine Anne Porter, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound, have appeared in the magazine. SR also has a long tradition of cultivating emerging talent: they published excerpts of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor’s first novels, and the early poetry of Robert Penn Warren, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell. “Whatever the new literature turns out to be,” wrote editor Allen Tate in 1944, “it will be the privilege of the Sewanee Review to print its share of it, to comment on it, and to try to understand it.” The mission remains unchanged.