The days might be getting shorter, but that just means longer evenings to curl up with the new issue of The Southern Review! Wander into snowy woods with a single mother and her daughter in Genevieve Plunkett’s “Prepare Her,” and join a group of rowdy boys as they make a disastrous attempt at yuletide vandalism in Rowan Beaird’s “Lights.” You can learn what happens when a pair of lovers tries to save their mortgage with a con in Taymour Soomro’s “Athena and the Grand Reveal,” and see the late feminist writer Taeko Kōno spin a story about a successful businesswoman in postwar Japan, translated by Lucy North. Jane Hirshfield and David Hernandez both return to our pages with two new poems each, while the Iraqi writer Kadham Kanjar provides poems about the upheaval in his homeland, as translated by Khaled Hegazzi and Andy Young. Along with new poems by Bill Lavender, Julia B. Levine, and Pulitzer Prize–winner Stephen Dunn, this issue also features the mixed-media work of New York–based artist Tomokazu Matsuyama, whose technicolor canvases synthesize and reinvent symbolism from both East and West.