“They’re Not Normal People”: Azazel Jacobs’s French Exit

By Madeline Whittle

FEB 2021 | Film

An exceptional ensemble cast—including Michelle Pfeiffer and Lucas Hedges—renders the absurd with singular emotional nuance (and comic timing) in Azazel Jacobs’s latest, co-written by and adapted from a novel by Patrick DeWitt.

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.

Sandcastles: Afghanistan, One Year On

By Matthew Byrne

SEPT 2022 | Field Notes

A symbolic twenty years after 9/11, the Biden administration formally ended the United States’ war in Afghanistan, withdrawing the last of its troops from the south-central Asian nation. Melancholy anniversaries serve as reminders of missed opportunities, and this one is no different. Here, however, blunders appear frivolous when compared to the extraordinary corruption and pitiless violence perpetrated by US-backed forces in the region. While much has been made of the shockingly haphazard exit, the ease with which the Taliban seized Kabul, and the grim prospects for women, for girls, and for Afghans who worked with coalition forces, the cardinal sin of the war was not how it ended, but how it began.

52. (New York’s Waterways)

By Raphael Rubinstein

MAY 2021 | The Miraculous

Upon graduating from art school, a young artist attends a boat-building school in Northern California. When she moves to New York City a few years later she puts her newly-acquired nautical skills to use by building a small boat capable of circumnavigating Manhattan.