As we were working on our new Summer issue, my partner and I began fostering a rescue dog, a seven-month-old pit bull named Woody. Left to his own devices on a sidewalk, Woody has the manner of someone searching for a lost earring. Often, having found the thing he was apparently looking for, he refuses to budge. It was only after we had spent a couple of weeks dragging him down our street that a friend advised that, without being given time to sniff at things, he was exhausting his body but not his mind, which was why he was often as antic after a walk as he was before. “Smelling is like reading for them,” the friend said.

I grew up being told that reading makes you a more empathetic, nicer person; more recently, I’ve heard that “deep reading” (which means, essentially, reading a book) is the best way to reclaim your atrophying attention span. For some, who might prefer to outsource the activity and receive a quick description of what it was like, it’s an anachronism. Headlines say that children are spending less of their spare time with books—in Britain, the problem is a “relentless” focus on literacy, which sounds particularly Roald Dahl. What all these conversations are missing, of course, is the fact that reading is one of the most mysterious, pleasurable pastimes we have—which is why we have put together a Summer issue that we believe will fill you with a strange feeling of yearning, like a dog at a tree stump who would like to stay longer than is feasible. So it was after my colleague Dennis passed me Shuang Xuetao’s “God’s Arrow,” which appears in print for the first time in our pages, in a translation by Jeremy Tiang, and is named after a weapon with magical powers. “If it flies through the air,” says an enigmatic benefactor of the kind we could all use, “hold in your mind what you want to happen, and it will come true.”

That’s not to say that the writing in these pages will give you what you think you want. Lucy Ellmann’s “MT” launches itself at the reader in the form of a sixteen-page catalogue of the nefarious activities performed by “men together” (“Men together, tear-gassing protesters. Men together drilling for oil. Men together shooting people in Bible-study groups. Men together itching to finger any control panel going …”). And Chigozie Obioma’s “The Yellow Leaf” takes us into the apartment of a couple who have recently fled Nigeria for Italy, where each finds themselves trapped in a different way. As Frederick Seidel has it in his new poem “Deadheads in the Dark,” “There’s nothing to sing except a song / Because it won’t be long. It’s all gone wrong.”

The image of a broken rainbow on the issue’s front cover is by Alex Da Corte. Some readers—especially, Da Corte recently said, “friends of Dorothy”—might recognize the rainbow as lifted from the cover of Mariah Carey’s 1999 album, where it’s spray-painted across her chest. The artwork’s title is The End—which, of course, is constantly receding. As a sage called Kermit once sang from his swamp, “Have you been half-asleep / and have you heard voices? / I’ve heard them calling my name. / Is this the sweet sound / that calls the young sailors? / The voice might be one and the same.”

Emily Stokes is the editor of  The Paris Review.