Welcome to the second issue of Illuminations. This is truly an exciting time to be involved in the production of electronic media. For many years online journals existed, much like the demimondaine of Gustav Klimt’s Woman with a Feather Hat and Boa, in the interstitial space between respectability and ignominy─more academic than the Sunday comics or CompuServe, but, as far as the literary establishment was concerned, faddish or (heavens!) “populist.” In the past few years the relationship between academia and the internet has been radically altered, and it is with this issue of Illuminations that we have matured into a fully international online literary journal. We received a veritable deluge of submissions from over fifteen nations (included in this issue: Sweden, China, Germany, Greece, and the US)─which would have been an absurdity for a small Texas private college in the murky times before the advent of the digital age. That said, it is not our desire to engage in tiresome, hackneyed discussions on the “death of print media”; nor do we wish to erroneously herald the advent of some glorious new digital epoch in the history of man, where everyone is liberated from their  prisons of flesh in order to join some immortal internet hive-brain. We realize that pompous ideological promulgations, dubious eschatological claims, and anything remotely approaching the opprobrium of manifestos are best left in more capable hands. We simply want to make the best  undergraduate work in the world available to the widest audience possible, accomplished, of course, without a trace of editorial hubris.