Fall Reading Recommendations: The I'm Fine Edition

Fall Reading Recommendations: The I'm Fine Edition

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“It is what you read when you don't have to,” Oscar Wilde wrote, “that determines what you will be when you can't help it.” Most of us at Epiphany are no longer in school, so we’ve moved away from required reading to reading that is individually urgent. Here are the books we’re enjoying these days, from coming-of-age novels to true espionage, and beyond.

 

The Book of Evergreens by Josiah Hoopes

“I recently visited the New York Botanical Gardens and was entranced by a book about, yes, pine trees that a guy compiled in the late nineteenth century. I'm now dipping into it for the strange and beautiful language, as well as the feel of the paper and old-fashioned type setting. It's a book for foresters and poets.” – Safia Jama, reader

Last Minute Travellers [from the print issue SS17]

Last Minute Travellers [from the print issue SS17]

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I wake up before you, as I always do.

This is a rented room.

 

Two days ago, you told me that I was emotionally manipulative. That I am always desperately seeking attention, how pathetic it made me appear. You told me things change, and people change, and the things people desire change. And then you told me to fuck off.

Infertility

Infertility

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We couldn’t have children.

If you’re looking for a happy ending, you won’t find it here.

 

1.

 

The minute we started down this medical track, we knew we were going to lose. That was our problem. We were defeatists. The fight wasn’t in us.

Sameer Pandya Interview + A Story

Sameer Pandya Interview + A Story

The Editors

Sameer Pandya’s story “M-O-T-H-E-R” follows an Indian-American family in California whose mother, Uma, has high ambitions for her teenage sons in their spelling bee competitions. The story is ripe with dramatic, cross-cultural, and family tensions which are all, inevitably, universal. The story appeared in the Epiphany 2007-2008 Winter/Spring issue, and then as the first story in Pandya’s book The Blind Writer: Stories and a Novella, which was long-listed for the 2016 PEN Open Book Award. This year, Pandya was selected to be the 2017 PEN/Civitella Fellow, to join artists of varied backgrounds and disciplines in an international dialogue that transcends boundaries.

I had the pleasure of conducting an interview via email this month with Sameer Pandya

What Kind of Omen Am I

What Kind of Omen Am I

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Seeking riches? Become the only raised presence in a field so any bird will know where to shit. Let a swallowtail alone on a sill to attract success. Do lunar blackouts yield sea levels upping the horizon

 

to god? Enticing, save for a bunch of dead species floating like maimed angels. Don’t start anything new. Crossed knives: duel with a neighbor that no one survives. Stray shots at a child’s surprise party

On Translations

On Translations

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Translation

You can read a lot about what translations are or are supposed to be: different from the original text, a version of the original text, unrelated to the original text, work of cultural interaction, work of cultural invention, work that hustles along the search for global language.