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.

Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves: Wild Life

By David Carrier

NOV 2021 | ArtSeen

Elizabeth Murray (1940–2007) had an astonishing capacity to develop. Looking just at the works in Wild Life, her two person show with the sculptor Jessi Reaves (b. 1986) curated by Rebecca Matalon, the distance between Night Empire (1967-68) and C Painting (1980-81) is amazing.

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.

Susan Bernofsky’s Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser

By Cigdem Asatekin

JUL-AUG 2021 | Books

Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser (Yale University Press, 2021) is an affectionate, precise piece of writing that illustrates a man of complexities both personal and professional. It is an intimate portrait of an artist, soul-crushing in its realism, with all its valor and rigor.