Editor’s Note

By Will Chancellor

FEB 2021 | Fiction

This month we’re pleased to publish an excerpt from Vesna Maric’s The President Shop. The novel’s backdrop is an allegorical country, The Nation, steeped in tyranny, but the focus is on the human rather than the trappings of propaganda. I was struck by the young woman, Mona, decoding the timelessness that’s always present, even as we pass through moments that are consciously historic. “Symbology,” by Betsy M. Narváez, abounds in images, meanings, dreams, and visions. Here, there’s no official, waking world, little external at all. Narváez gives us resonant moments over coffee of a mother and a daughter unpuzzling the language of dreams. We’re also tremendously fortunate to have Maisy Card stepping in as co-editor of the fiction section of the Brooklyn Rail. Her debut novel, These Ghosts are Family, masterfully courses through the history of a family while communicating the texture and hunger of life as it was lived.

Debra Bricker Balken’s Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life

By David Carrier

MAY 2022 | Books

Born in Brooklyn to a relatively poor family, Harold Rosenberg spent a couple of years at City College and briefly attended law school. In the 1930s he wrote poetry and worked as an editor. Then during World War Two, because he had an injured leg, and wasn’t drafted, Rosenberg lived in Washington, DC and worked for the Office of War Information.

Editor’s Note

By Paul Mattick

JUL-AUG 2022 | Field Notes

It’s not going so well, is it? In Ukraine, Biden is prepared, it seems, to fight to the last Ukrainian, while preparing for the next war with China. Half the population of Afghanistan is facing starvation, especially since the US government has seized the billions of Afghan state assets, eked together out of opium sales and American aid, held in US banks.

from A Dream Life

By Claire Messud

DEC 21-JAN 22 | Fiction

We’re excited to publish an excerpt from Claire Messud’s forthcoming novel, A Dream Life. It’s 1971, the Armstrongs have moved from New York to Australia and reluctantly inhabit the role of gentry in a grand manor on the harbor. Alice Armstrong, by turns class oblivious and class consumed, seeks help with the considerable domestic labor their new life entails. Her first housekeepers (one named Africa is briefly mentioned in this excerpt) don’t pan out. Enter Simone Funk, who both recenters the story and expands its frame.