But DoubleTake, a Durham, North Carolina-based magazine edited by Robert Coles and Alex Harris, stands these conventions on their head. It looks backwards. It has everything to do with memory, its treasures and delusions, and nothing to do with the thought balloons and AM static of the Now. This deliberate timelessness gives the magazine a paradoxical and oddly enticing quality. Church can be a drag.
Sermons can pall.
But more often than not, DoubleTake succeeds. This is a magazine that gives its writers permission to play quietly, to listen to overtones, to drift patiently with a piece's subtle inner logic or logics. It's this softness, this willingness to wait, to not force a conclusion to appear, that is perhaps DoubleTake's most praiseworthy editorial quality. There are many strong pieces in the magazine's Summer issue, including a subtle short story by Tobias Wolff, a powerful memoir of El Salvador's assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero by the poet Carolyn Forche and a lost short story by Flannery O'Connor. It's a piece that reveals both the strengths and the weaknesses of the skeletonless, ruminative, feminine style favored by the magazine.