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.

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.

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.

All What I Want is Life

By Ruba Al-Sweel

JUL-AUG 2020 | ArtSeen

Seldom is civil unrest in the Arab world discussed beyond hushed dinner conversations or in the context of economic decay on corporate roundtables. In Dubai’s center for photography, Gulf Photo Plus (GPP), however, it’s the topic du jour. A pictorial and filmic essay drawn from Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria, and Sudan, All What I Want is Life takes its title from a cri de cœur strewn across the walls of the Saadoun Tunnel in graffiti in Baghdad. “This is an exhibition of protest photography, not photojournalism”