It was March 2023, and I was alone in Wellington. The creative writing class I’d traveled there to teach had ended. Antipodean summer was ending too, night falling earlier, rain dripping from the lemonwood trees, the gray surface of the harbor whipped and wrinkled by a wind that roared ceaselessly through the Cook Strait.
Curated by KEI LIM
With our spring issue hot off the press, check out these recommendations from three of the issue’s contributors: LIZ DEWOLF, ANDREW STEINER, and MARIA TERRONE.
Zach Williams’ Beautiful Days, recommended by Issue 31 contributor Liz DeWolf
I first came across Zach Williams’ work when I read his 2022 story “Wood Sorrel House” in The New Yorker. The story, in which a family arrives at a rental cabin and then forgets everything about their lives before, including how they got there, deeply unsettled me. Something about Williams’ careful, straightforward prose makes each disturbing revelation—The baby doesn’t age while the parents do! Food mysteriously appears in the freezer!—all the more destabilizing.
The first time I saw Lake I was sitting on the bench between sets, waiting for the burn in my chest to subside. She walked past me to the big cage and slung her duffel to the floor. I watched with idle interest as she wrapped her wrists with soft black straps and wrangled her hair into a high loop. Her rose-colored Alphaletes came up well above her hips, and she wore a long-sleeved crop top that announced in block letters
NO TIME FOR RATS.
NO TIME FOR SNAKES.
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