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.

Rehearsing a Self: David Adjmi on Lot Six, A New Memoir and An Outsider's Anthem

By Sarah Lunnie

OCT 2020 | Theater

Award-winning playwright David Adjmi (Stunning, Marie Antoinette) has gifted the literary and theatrical communities with a bracing new memoir rich with insights into not so much his creative process, but instead a more personal one: the process of unraveling and restitching his tapestry of selfhood. Dramaturg Sarah Lunnie interviews her peer in this honest recount of what it took to craft a memoir over ten years.

Julie Mehretu: about the space of half an hour

By William Corwin

DEC 20-JAN 21 | ArtSeen

In this new body of work—actually three different sets of paintings and etchings—Julie Mehretu is inscribing marks from a series of hands: her own, the fingerprints of digital interventions, and even the hand of the Almighty (at least by implication), on a series of roiled and undulating backgrounds.

Louise Fishman: An Hour is a Sea

By Hearne Pardee

MAY 2020 | ArtSeen

Originally intended for Frieze New York, the works went online due to current events, but one can’t escape the sense that the digital format, while denying us the materiality so vital in Fishman’s work, enhances our experience in other ways, enlarging the paintings’ scope as if to compensate for their physical absence.