New Salmagundi features playwright Gerda Stevenson

Reason: The issue features not only the full text of the play by the Scottish playwright, director and lead actress, but also a lengthy interview with Stevenson conducted by Bob Boyers, professor of English and editor of Salmagundi.

"Tennis is the informing backdrop or metaphor for the play, but is by no means the subject," says Robert Boyers, professor of English and editor of Salmagundi. "The play is personal and political and tender and feral and thoroughly unnerving. It's so unlike anything lately performed on American shores as to be completely disarming."

Boyers and his wife, Peg, Salmagundi executive editor, were so taken with "Federer Vs Murrary" when they first saw it at the Edinburgh Festival last August that they saw it again with novelist Michael Ondaatje. Equally impressed, Ondaatje helped them to persuade Stevenson to commit the play to the pages of Salmagundi.

Because of this arrangement, the playwright then decided to submit her play to an international competition, which she won. That led in turn to the three-week run of the play atthe 59E59 Theater, which ends April 22. [For tickets, click here.]

Following this Friday night's performance of "Federer Versus Murray," Daniel Kraines, a member of the Skidmore Class of 2010, will host at his 59th Sttreet apartment a party in honor of Gerda Stevenson. Attending will be the Boyers, Salmagundi associate editor Marc Woodworth, and 25 others who are associated with the magazine and with the New York State Summer Writers Institute.

Among other gems to be found in the new issue:

• a long memoir by novelist Howard Norman on the suicide that took place in his house and led to repercussions that are still felt by the author and his poet-wife Jane Shore;
• the first installment of a regular Salmagundi column by the great Yugoslav novelist Dubravka Ugresic, in which she writes about exile and the loss of a language and the miseries of living "in translation";
• a series of shattering new poems by Pulitzer Prize-winner Franz Wright;
• the 2011 Sigmund Freud Lecture delivered in Vienna last spring by novelist-essayist Siri Hustvedt, in which she considers the intermediate region between illness and "real life."

Looking ahead, Boyers says Salmagundi readers can look forward to a special pre-election fall issue built around three key debates: "The Myth of Progress," "The Collapse of Liberalism," and "America in Decline." Participants include Martin Jay, James Miller, George Scialabba, Richard Sennett, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Stewart Justman, Rochelle Gurstein, and Jackson Lears.

New material is continually being posted on the Salmagundiblog. Among notable recent posts: this report on the recent "Salmagundi Salon," which enlisted Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Kennedy's assistance in recreating Old Havana, circa 1958, and this video interpretation of the evening by Noah Throop.

To celebrate its collaboration with Gerda Stevenson and 59E59 Theater, Salmagundi is offering new subscribers a two-year subscription to the magazine for the one year rate of $20 ? plus a free copy of the current issue e ven if you can?t make it to the theater.To subscribe, click here.