Publisher's Message
A Note to Our Readers
When the artist Shoja Azari visited the Brooklyn Rail’s headquarters and my studio in Greenpoint this past August, right after a flash flood claimed 20 percent of my recent work, he half-jokingly suggested that I call my forthcoming exhibition After the Flood. How poignant and prophetic. Work According to the Rail, Part I: After the Flood opened at Showroom Gallery on Sunday evening, October 29, the night before Hurricane Sandy’s arrival. Instead of postponing, we rescheduled the opening at the last minute to accommodate the imminent suspension of all public transit; poet Bob Holman called this “such a New Yorker thing to do.”
The next night Sandy’s assault destroyed the bulk of my work from the last 25 years, as well as most of the Rail’s selected archives. The water in our studio/storage space surged over six feet; many of our neighbors also experienced devastating losses to both their artwork and livelihood. New York’s atmosphere is somber right now. We at the Rail wish to commemorate those who have lost their lives and send our heartfelt condolences to all those who have suffered in the wake of the storm. On a personal note, I am grateful to our remarkable staff for their heroic effort during a difficult time. I also want to express deep gratitude to our neighbors Anibal Farran, Matthew Williams, Katherine Fitch, Marion LeCognic, Joe Mitner, and Stella Lee Prowse, whose amazing support helped to salvage some of the work.
New Yorkers weathered 9/11, and I myself survived the war and labor camp in Vietnam. I believe we will all rise above this time with a greater purpose in life and art.
Avanti,
Phong Bui
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A Time of One’s Own: The Struggle Against One-sided Narratives of History
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The relationship to time escapes me regularly, and vice versa, due to a chronic desynchronization—an incompatibility of cruising speeds, even—that I experience in my ordinary quotidian life and in my artistic practice. Moreover, the gap between the measurement and the evaluation of time varies significantly according to cultures, eras, and perspectives, and is also reflected in elements of language and in current prejudices that consist, in particular, of praising the strong allure of the great powers as opposed to celebrating slowness.
Editor’s Note
MARCH 2021 | Fiction
This month, we bring you two works that explore the isolating effects of grief. In her short story “To the Sea,” Sharon Adarlo uses magical realism to explore the way a tragic event can change us. The protagonist at the center is so consumed by her grief after the death of her child that she must endure a kind of supernatural growth to overcome it. Beatriz Bracher structures novels—Antonio is the second of her four novels to be translated into English and published by New Directions—around the peculiarities of narrative: uncertain recollections, overlooked characters, and crucial details hidden in plain sight. This novel’s central character, Benjamim, father to the titular Antonio, seeks the details of his own father’s life. But rather than follow Benjamim on the case, we're reading the fragments he collects. As readers, we’re substitute-detectives sorting through the accounts of three narrators and pinning our own red thread to the evidence.
