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.

Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind

By Joseph Peschel

NOV 2020 | Books

Rumaan Alam, a Brooklynite himself, begins his third novel, Leave the World Behind (2020), as if it were a domestic comedy of manners about a Brooklyn family on vacation in Long Island. Alam transforms the story, with its serious and witty commentary on social class and race relations, into a psychological thriller—a dystopian tale about the end of the world.

Editor’s Note

By Will Chancellor

NOV 2020 | Fiction

We turn to international fiction for new voices, new worlds, and new perspectives. But beyond the new, there’s another feature that I find myself in dire need of right now: external gravity. This month we publish excerpts from two recent selections in Archipelago Books expansive map of world literature. The first story, “Igifu,” by Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga, makes physical the weight of hunger (igifu) and shows how lack can become the center around which a family orbits. The second selection is an excerpt from Colombian novelist Tomás González’s Difficult Light. The novel consists of thirty three meditations on family and beauty, told by a painter looking up from the gravity well of grief. Both Mukasonga and González write with profound depth and make us question whether the center we’re wheeling around is really so central, so inescapable after all.

Susan Bee: Anywhere Out of the World: New Paintings, 2017–2020

By Yínká Elújọba

NOV 2020 | ArtSeen

Susan Bee is creating new mythologies to help grapple with a collapsing universe. In Anywhere Out of the World she embraces archetypes and iconic images to reinterpret societal and personal struggles.