Editor's notes.(Editorial)

Every two years or so we have been devoting an issue of The Kenyon Review to a single topic or theme. This seems a reasonable balance with our general issues. The next special topic is exciting and perhaps a little daring for a literary magazine: I am delighted to announce that the Winter 2006 issue (published in December 2005) will focus on the artistic, ethical, and imaginative implications of the Human Genome Project. Essays, poems, stories, short plays, and photographs that engage these issues are invited no later than April 1, 2005.

Near the start of this millennium an organism--the human--evolved for the first time to the point of reading the code of its own being. Now comes the far greater task of interpreting, of struggling to understand that digital genetic text. Surely this must be an artistic, a …