Elizabeth Lothian
Elizabeth Lothian is a Brooklyn bred writer and co-editor of the Rail’s Books section. Her work has appeared in Bookforum, Guernica, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction from the New School where she was a Creative Writing Fellow.
My mentor taught us the gravity of reading in a writer’s life, told us of how in graduate school, he had always held a book in one hand, stopping reading only to sleep or, of course, to write. In his office hours, he took interest in what I was reading, what I liked to read. He told me he loved the smart, weird girl narrator (who doesn’t) in a story I had written. And then, pulling a copy off his shelf, how he had a book I must read: Samantha Hunt’s The Seas.
On the occasion of the awarding of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Rail Books section co-editors Elizabeth Lothian and Joseph Salvatore interviewed 2023 recipient Tyriek White about his debut novel We Are a Haunting. In their conversation, White discusses troubling the boundaries between Western ideas of life and death, writing a story about growing up in a predominantly Black and brown, blue-collar neighborhood, and how Brooklyn to him represents an attitude, a demeanor, and a set of principles.
Set against the backdrop of sun-blasted Los Angeles and at-“its best at night” New York City and crafted with a poet’s enthralling and attentive command of language, Ben Fama’s debut novel asks us to consider what is true in our social media, celebrity obsessed culture, and what is just our fantasy.
Alone in the gallery, I reflect on how the violence of war and battles both large and small is often memorialized as heroism. I consider how the preservation of these monuments preserves the power of violence and how through this preservation the destruction of the collective is glorified. Perhaps at the end of imagination our new beginning will bloom not from what we remember but rather from what we leave behind, dead and unrescued.
The son of Taiwanese immigrants, Hsu is the one to tell us his story of friendship, identity building, grief, and his search for solace after tragedy, by taking us back then to his teenage years in the Bay Area in the nineties.
