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.

Francine Tint: Life in Action

By David Ebony

NOV 2022 | ArtSeen

Mostly large canvases (up to 6 by 10 feet) painted within the past three years, in the midst of the pandemic, the works on view in Francine Tint: Life in Action appear as luminous and effervescent as any she has made. But within the parameters of the visual vocabulary she has established over decades, Tint reveals a highly nuanced range of emotional states—from exuberantly euphoric to introspectively pensive.

Michael Brenson’s David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformative Sculptor

By Brandt Junceau

DEC 22–JAN 23 | Books

This artist’s life stares back at the would-be biographer, like a gorgon. The author turned a mirror on it. The tale is made to tell itself, witness by witness, snapped off in an unblinking chain of hard short chapters, almost voice by voice. By conscientious decision, maybe a matter of self-preservation, Brenson is a laconic guide rather than interpreter and thankfully, no explainer.

Charles Baxter’s Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature

By Joseph Peschel

SEPT 2022 | Books

“The hardest part of being a writer is learning how to survive the dark nights of the soul,” Charles Baxter writes about halfway through his new book, Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature. This isn’t Baxter’s first book about writing and the life of the writer as an artist.