by Yoojin Na

Members Only author Sameer Pandya talks with Yoojin Na about the ideal measure of novelistic time, India, layered moments in fiction, and the grace of tennis.

How do you write about hard times without trying to fix them?

“Last month our dog Zoe died.”

“A prayer here for all distractible children, capable of flight.”

“Dance is the art that disappears.”

“I wasn’t willing to participate in swindling others into believing that Hungary was open to foreigners…”

“Isherwood’s prose blends genre and crosses time to revisit key moments in his development as a writer, a gay man, and a global citizen in Berlin.”

To escape the pandemic, a writer attends the most brutal clown school in the world.

“I have yearned for the right to have nothing to say, and the confidence to say it anyway.”

“Sick, in these days, means alone.”

“The Insurrection Act of 1807 was enacted in silence. It has no legislative history.”

“I was a fixture, a force, and a fierce advocate of fashion and style,” Talley writes in the memoir’s introduction. He also acknowledges how, for most of his career, he was the only person of color in “the upper echelons of fashion journalism.”

The Cave of the Seven Sleepers is a medieval legend, shared within Christian and Muslim circles.

by Hawa Allan

Everyone thinks they know what love is, but most have no clue. Reading hooks' works on love, you’ll likely discover, for the most part, that nobody loves you. Not your family, not your friends, not your “lover.” You also might discover that you don’t love anyone either.

Decomposition does not happen in isolation. You cannot decompose alone.

Here’s the deal: Manuel Neuer, German team captain, six-foot-tall blond man and possibly the world’s greatest goalie, elected to wear a rainbow-striped captain’s armband, first in a friendly against Latvia, and then in the first two tournament games against France and Portugal. Following the second match, it was announced that UEFA (Union of European Football Associations, the European Cup’s governing body), was considering sanctions on the grounds that the armband was a political statement.

There is a feeling like the liquid at the top of an overfilled glass, taut and quivering. I think of that feeling as my feeling, my go-to.

If one of the things we get from engaging with other beings is some sort of reflectivity, reflexivity, this past year I have been alienated not only from other people, but from myself. Much of the life that I have been able to encounter, not through a screen at least, for the past year, has been non-human.

Horror is not ambiguous and it's clear purpose is to scare. I find that clarity, freeing. It is as if by submerging yourself in a horror story, you will be unmade, but you can also re-emerge, different than before, if you choose. The overused adage is true: we imagine horrors in order to cope with real ones.

Bonnie Chau reflects on being Asian-American, the ideas and motivations of representation and visibility, the Amanda Gorman translation debate, and translating out of whiteness.

As we moved through the “Know Thyself” syllabus, I grappled to articulate the elements that went into knowing myself. I hammered away at myself like an interrogator. Does it help, knowing that everything you do is fodder for future stories? Are new experiences better for providing you with new material, or scarier for removing your history and the foundation of your stories thus far?

I suppose in every discipline, the threat of artistic integrity being tainted by money is inescapable. I’ve been thinking about this alongside something Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap write about in the introduction to The Racial Imaginary anthology, about how the imagination is not free, and there is no version of it that exists in a vacuum, untouched by the hierarchical structures of society.

What do I do when I need solace? When I lose the sense of wonder I can only get by physically being with the people I love, experiencing the places I love, and everything in between? I do what I’ve always done: I write about family.

Le Carré situates spying within the wider, mundane world. This, I believe, is why so many insist that he is a genre outlier, rather than an example of what can be accomplished within “genre writing” when the material is honored.

I thought about the elements of a thriller, as a genre: danger, death, uncertainty, violence, crime, corruption. Certainly all of these things are in the ether as we speak; and suspense, well, we are all undeniably suspended in some way right now.

I have stopped dressing to be seen; I dress for walking. I cropped my hair and allowed it to go salt and pepper. With the mask and the hair and the tennis shoes, I am unrecognizable, sometimes even to myself.

On nights that I can't sleep, I feel sorry for my eggs. I worry that they're suffering in their own snow country of liquid nitrogen. I know such concerns are beyond ridiculous. After all, my eggs are not tiny, microscopic people. They aren't even embryos.

The answer to the “Negro question” is a mix of sermon and jeremiad, calling attention to the gap between a desired moral universe and disastrous present reality.