DAISY ATTERBURY
Growing up in the Southwest, the landscape already felt informed by projection, the language used to describe it extraterrestrial. It’s not that I imagine I’ve literally been to the moon, but that I came of age in a place where the imaginary and the material continually displaced one another.

TEJU COLE
I really believe in the novel as an innovative form. Yet I didn’t want novelty for its own sake. There had to be something necessary in how I approached the narrating. For me, this was a puzzle to be solved, this work of arriving at the many different ways a character might give an account of what it means to be in the world. 

ALLISON FUNK
You must leave everything you’ve carried / to enter the tomb, says the guide / pointing to the passage grave / mounded / with earth. From outside, / the tumulus all but obscures / death’s reach, / also its fruitfulness…

REBECCA WORBY
Red, red blood, not the dark red of a period. I know this immediately even though I have only just had my first period in years, and as alarm bells go off in my mind, I begin to sweat, my heart suddenly clanging. It’s only day twelve of my cycle, as far as I’ve calculated, so it’s clear that something is wrong. I don’t know what the wrong thing is, but one possibility surfaces even as I try to push it down.

TERAO TETSUYA
I remembered reading in a magazine about “cabin fever,” a phenomenon common in high-altitude areas during harsh winters. When forced to stay in the same small indoor space for an extended period, people will develop abnormally intense feelings toward each other such as disdain

ILAN STAVANS
If he had a scientific mind, he also had a fretful, adventurous spirit. He was convinced, as his letters attest time and again, that every experience, regardless of how mysterious it might be, ought to be described in words. He loved to take chances, even if they led to a dead end.

DIANE MEHTA and PHILLIS LEVIN
This conversation took place over the course of weeks—over daily phone calls and long emails, meals when they were in the same place, and a weekend in the Connecticut countryside. The poets share what they draw from each other’s work, and the work of others, exploring the pleasures of language, geometric movement, and formal constraint.

DANIELA ALCIVAR BELLOLIO
The image came to him all the time, uncontrollably, relentlessly: a face, combining incomprehension and terror perfectly, as though they were a natural combination. Pain was almost absent from this mixture, though he was certain that there, too, must have been pain. The image came to him all the time.

SEÁN CARLSON
Frawley revisits memory to anchor her love and affection for each of her parents as she knew them. With precision and tenderness, she flits between their real and imagined pasts, her own bifurcated sense of “home,” the depths of friendships, and a shared dislocation and community found alongside her immigrant neighbors.

ALA JANBEK
After a year and a half in the neighborhood, I no longer wonder if I should buy a snack from the red shop or the blue one; instead, I buy from Abu Hussein, who throws in a date and a walnut for free (because you can’t eat a date by itself).