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.

Vincent Van Gogh: A Life in Letters

By Joshua Sperling

DEC 20-JAN 21 | Books

Though lacking the inexpensive allure of the old paperback editions—not to mention the comprehensiveness of the six-volume collector’s set released in 2009—A Life in Letters succeeds by placing a modest sampling of Van Gogh’s correspondence into dialogue with both the life and the paintings. Each phase of the artist’s wandering is bracketed with a brief biographical précis, refreshingly unadorned and free of the usual apocrypha.

Editor’s Note

MARCH 2021 | Fiction

This month, we bring you two works that explore the isolating effects of grief. In her short story “To the Sea,” Sharon Adarlo uses magical realism to explore the way a tragic event can change us. The protagonist at the center is so consumed by her grief after the death of her child that she must endure a kind of supernatural growth to overcome it. Beatriz Bracher structures novels—Antonio is the second of her four novels to be translated into English and published by New Directions—around the peculiarities of narrative: uncertain recollections, overlooked characters, and crucial details hidden in plain sight. This novel’s central character, Benjamim, father to the titular Antonio, seeks the details of his own father’s life. But rather than follow Benjamim on the case, we're reading the fragments he collects. As readers, we’re substitute-detectives sorting through the accounts of three narrators and pinning our own red thread to the evidence.

The Game of Life - Emergence in Generative Art

By Charlotte Kent

SEPT 2020 | ArtSeen

Moving past familiar questions about art, machines, autonomy, and authorship that have been around since the invention of photography, the generative artworks on view through Kate Vass’s website offers a chance to think about our respective starting points, the steps we take, and how rules apply in this game of life.