A girl, a fax machine, a dog, another planet. This is how Marie-Helene Bertino explains the focus of her new novel, Beautyland, which came out last week with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Like all of Bertino’s writing, Beautyland teeters on the knife’s edge of fantasy. The book follows an alien’s […]
The Pocket Book | Natalie Southworth
The year I started junior high, I played ringette on Wednesday nights. One of those nights my father told me we had a stop to make before going home. He said he was painting the guest room of Madame Lavoie, a friend of one of my father’s colleagues at the […]
Rituals | Martha Schabas
Nothing like sadness or anger set in right away when M sat me down one afternoon last February and told me he was moving out of our apartment. The conversation we had after felt relaxed and almost warm—it seemed perfectly normal when he paused after twenty minutes or so and […]
An Interview | Diana Reid on Relationships, Morality, and How to Write a Contemporary Novel
Diana Reid dared herself to write a novel. She loved reading, so why not try? If she couldn’t write one during the pandemic, then she figured she probably never would. Unlike most of us who resolved to finish In Search of Lost Time or master the sourdough starter, Diana was […]
“I was still just some guy at a party:” Andrew Martin on Success, First Novels, and the Role of Revisions
There’s a moment in the short story “No Cops” where the heroine of the story Leslie is hanging with her closest friend as she closes up a patron-less bookstore in Missoula, Montana. Leslie holds a “waifish” book of contemporary poetry as she spaces out and contemplates the merits of intention […]
KAYFABE | Tom Quach
He dubbed himself the “Lady-Killer,” stitched across the butt of his white tights in red cursive letters. On his crotch, a faded broken red heart split into two. That was his gimmick—the pretty boy who’d check himself out with a compact mirror as he strutted down the metal ramp. There […]
Blistering | Alasdair Rees
Tyson’s thigh is touching my thigh. Where our legs meet on the bench, the radiant heat from his body moves through the fabric of his pants and the fabric of my pants. It’s a strange communication, I think, taking the last gulp of my mason jar of sparkling rosé. Condensation has gathered on the bottom of the jar, and I cannot help but hold the jar in the final position of my gulp, focusing and unfocusing my eyes; seeing through the bottom of the jar, letting the dew obscure the image; watching the strange blobby shape of Evelyn’s flower, watching it dissolve into an even blobbier smear.
Twelve Signs Your 1918 Pandemic Affair Was Better Than a European Getaway | Jean Marc Ah-Sen
The typo on the personalized locket procured on a holiday destination acquires a forced whimsicality that must be recited ad nauseam at parties, which could have otherwise been exchanged for the discreet charm of store credit.
In Between Two Voids | Nahid Keshavarz, translated by Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi
Darya is uncomfortable. Controlling the group doesn’t seem to be easy. She keeps thinking of Reza Sa’adat, and their last phone call where he said fear of death is perpetually with us, that sometimes we acknowledge it consciously and other times, hide it until it manifests in other things. The fear of loneliness and fear of death are similar. Perhaps if we can overcome the fear of solitude, we can overcome the fear of death as well.
excerpt from Silver Repetition | Lily Wang
To remember is to deny memory — to remember is to reimagine, restructure, recombine. Only through memory’s silver window can my cousin reappear. The soft, round nose, the open shell of her ear, a droplet of sweat on her temple, the skin there a little shiny, a little pink, never anything but enchanting. My hand is small in hers; in the pale grass, she harvests a fistful of black hair from the field and wraps it around her wrist like a circle of leeches.
The Age of Worry | Yvonne Cha
My real life is a mess, that’s true. I’ve been using my mom’s bank account to pay people for stuff on Venmo without her knowing, and now she’s filed a complaint for fraud. Do I tell her it’s me, I’m sorry, I never have enough money, I am always buying something for myself and occasionally for others too. Bella Hadid gave away $25,000 worth of coats to the Bowery Mission. If I hadn’t bought a bunch of shitty Zara blazers the other week I would have saved enough to have enough to actually help someone, is that it…?
A Return of Sorts | Gaby Edwards
We were five middle school girls in the Catskills, celebrating the onset of summer vacation with tick checks, crumbly s’mores, and the watchful eyes of one chaperoning mother. It would be the last time I saw any of them, except for Ariel. I was moving to San Diego in two weeks, which I guessed was the only reason I had been invited along.
An Interview | Saborna Roychowdhury on Class, Muslim Stereotypes, and her new novel, Everything Here Belongs To You
Saborna Roychowdhury’s novel, Everything Here Belongs to You, written in the aftermath of 9/11 and the subsequent backlash against Muslims, takes on the ambitious task of addressing the vast gulf of prejudice across nations, religions, and classes by brilliantly bringing together under one roof all the characters who embody different positions in this geopolitical conflict that spans nations, from the US to Afghanistan and India.
Sentiments and Directions from an Unappreciated Contrarian Writer’s Widow | Jean Marc Ah-Sen
A life in harmony with others is a wasted one.
A man’s character is usually the opposite of that which masquerades on his face; for this reason, moderation appears to be the greatest of hidden human faults, while at the same time the most difficult to apprehend.
Apparently, never let an opportunity go by to befoul a well-heeled fellow’s banquet table.
An Interview | Jonathan Garfinkel on Georgian Theater, the Duplicity of the Soviet Union, and his debut novel
“No one is who they say they are, not even myself,” reflects performance artist Tamar Tumanishvili halfway through Jonathan Garfinkel’s funny and wild debut novel, In a Land without Dogs the Cats Learn to Bark. Tamar is about to begin a three-day bus ride from Istanbul to Tbilisi in order to investigate the mysterious past of her mentor, academic Rachel Grabinsky, whose recent death has led Tamar to reassess both Rachel’s identity and her own.
Boys Club | Jack Donnelly
When I got to a certain age, though I was unaware of its certainty, my mother, with concern, took me aside and said, You are going to have to learn what I do, and have done, to know how to appreciate women in all of their habits and performances. It was too much for her to be a wife and a mother. I was only a son.
Kenyon Archive Report | Naben Ruthnum
Two years ago, a National Review piece describing Augustus Kenyon as “a somehow universally-beloved black Kissinger” elicited zero comment from the man or his foundation and ended the career of its author, Jurgen Schilze. Schilze works in industrial sourcing now, and we wanted to clarify that he is not either of us. We’re only mentioning him here to protect him from rumour and any harassment that he hasn’t earned himself. We—and we is the only way we’ll be identifying ourselves in this post—arrived at our idea to hack the digital lockbox containing the Augustus Kenyon archive after reading Schilze’s article. Not from Jurgen’s many borderline-racist arguments and his repeated elision of facts that worked against his portrayal of Kenyon as a ruthless manipulator, but from the shadows cast by gaps in Kenyon’s biography, the empty zones that Schilze pointed out.
Moth | J. M. Wong
Her cheeks had sunken so drastically that her cheekbones were much more pronounced than usual, giving her a very sharp edge. Her lips sagged, corners of her mouth drooping. The distance between her nose and chin was reduced. A bit of dark hair sprouted underneath her nose and on her chin as if she was starting to grow a beard. Without her teeth, her face had partially collapsed.
Excerpt from Psychic Lectures | Lee Suksi
You’ve felt like this since you became conscious at four years old. Always rushing to smother your sibling with a blanket to protect them from the cold. You can be too much. You want with an adrenal magnitude. You want the squares of sky in between the skyline, you want the sweet young trees, you want the girl bent over on the side of the passing bus, orange juice, pie and big drinks of wine.
Toronto 488 | Aaron Kreuter
That night, I feverishly read through the novel, sitting at my mother’s kitchen table in the dark, my cup of coffee long cold beside me. This was it. This was what I had been trying to do for all those years. The novel’s characters grew up in Jewish Montreal in the sixties and seventies, moved to Toronto in the eighties, bringing with them their dramas, their prejudices, their recipes, their joys.