Alice wondered if Marianne would connect the dots. She did. In about three minutes. “Wait. What’s the name of the ship?”

“The Sea Lyric,” Alice said.

“Wasn’t that the name of the first ship?”

Marianne meant the name of the ship Alice had taken for her first honeymoon, about one year ago.

“Yes,” Alice said. “Same one.”

Question of Lust

Every thought that persists is contradiction.

Marcel Schwob

Jessica puts her fingers all the way inside me like she is reaching up to hold my guts. I’m laying sideways on the bed with my underwear around my ankles, trying to stay cool about this. Her nails are sparkly and manicured to perfect points, like diamonds cut rough at the tip of her fingers.

My mother used to read to me when I was little, mostly at bedtime but sometimes in the afternoons on the couch. My favorite thing was climbing up into her lap with a book. Back then, she was always above me. She’d take the book I’d come with and hold it out in front of us. I remember the way the light came in from the balcony. With her arms around me, it felt as if I was wearing the warmth of her body, as if her beautiful face above me was mine.

In this interview, Alanna Duncan spoke to writer Cyrus Grace Dunham about queer bodies, naming, memory, and his new book, A Year Without A Name. The book, Dunham’s first – a memoir – is out from publishing company Little, Brown this month. A member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, he lives in Los Angeles.

how as the categorical theory of the scansion of our boundless distance
we started as finitesimal and infinitesimal
like divisions of membranes and compacted lovers

My mother was a den mother, but she wasn’t fanatical about it. Unlike Mrs. Kerner—the scoutmaster’s wife and leader of our rival den—she didn’t own an official uniform, nor did she attempt to educate us in the finer points of scouting, stuff like knot-tying, fire-building, and secret hand­ shakes. She considered herself a glorified babysitter and pretty much let us do as we pleased at our meetings, just as long as we amused ourselves and kept out of her hair.

In this interview, nonfiction MFA candidate Rachel Rueckert spoke to Terry Tempest Williams about her upcoming essay collection, Erosion: Essays of Undoing. In Erosion, Williams explores her connection to the American West, particularly her home state of Utah, as evolutionary process and how our undoing—of the self, self-centeredness, extractive capitalism, fear, tribalism—can also be our becoming, creating room for change and progress.

At multiple points in Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Jeannie Vanasco says that the goal of her project — contacting the man who raped her after years of close friendship when they were both teenagers — is to “show what seemingly nice guys are capable of.” “Mark” (she gives the rapist a pseudonym) speaks with her openly about the assault which does, I suppose, seem like something a nice guy would do. His reflections on his own actions in their conversations reveal apparent remorse and indicate that the rape, 14 years in the past at that point, has had a major impact on his life. At the very least, he’s thoughtful about it. The text, however, does not actually function as the banality-of-evil accounting that her statement of intent promises. Instead, it’s an exploration of the messiness of confrontation and the possibility of forgiveness.

By Mike Guisinger

In this interview, Online Nonfiction Editor Vera Carothers spoke to writer Leslie Jamison about her new book of essays Make It Scream, Make It Burn, the slow burn of revision, and how she writes her lyric endings. Leslie Jamison is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, and the novel The Gin Closet. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and her work has appeared in publications including The Atlantic, Harper’s, the New York Times Book Review, the Oxford American, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Tash Aw was born in Taipei and brought up in Malaysia. He is the author of The Harmony Silk Factory, which was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel, and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His other works include Map of the Invisible World, We, the Survivors, and Five Star Billionaire, which was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013. He is the author of a memoir of an immigrant family, The Face: Strangers on a Pier, a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. His novels have been translated into 23 languages. He is also a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and was a research fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

Rachel Lyon has done something many aspire to do: Made a career for herself as both a successful author and editor. Her debut novel, Self-Portrait With Boy, met with critical success, and is currently being developed as a feature film. Meanwhile, Lyon is the Editor-in-Chief at literary journal Epiphany. As part of our Ask the Editor series, Lyon spoke with MFA non-fiction candidate Elena Sheppard about her career path, what it really means to be an Editor-in-Chief, and what everyone who aspires to this kind of role really needs in their arsenal.

In Coventry, Rachel Cusk’s first collection of nonfiction writing, she has not reinvented the essay as she innovated the novel in her Outline trilogy—what she has done instead is showcase the pleasurable continuity of a mind at work on the same questions over time. We learn that she is less interested in writing about the self than in the often conflicting roles a self can inhabit—writer, mother, wife, daughter, in her case, or passive listener, teacher, and panelist in the case of Faye, the trilogy’s narrator. She

The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care is a chronicle of the cancer Anne Boyer was diagnosed with right after her forty-first birthday. Woven throughout the deeply personal story of her battle with breast cancer—the physical body breaking down in ways that rebel against what society tells us breast cancer should look like—is a social and political critique of the breast cancer “industry.” She calls into question the language we use to describe illness: “A body in mysterious agony exposes itself to medicine hoping to meet a vocabulary with which to speak of suffering in return. If that suffering does not meet sufficient language, those who endure the suffering must come together to invent it.” And more broadly, she persistently scrutinizes the industry that gives us walks for a cure, doctors who decide courses of treatment, companies that create language for the side effects of chemotherapy.

The engulfing panic of losing someone indispensable to you stops time. Needs and emotions are put on hold: hunger, sleep, lust, and ambition are stifled by mourning. From this numbness, how do you kickstart your life? How do you begin to make sense out of death and absence? In Naja Marie Aidt’s new book When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back, Carl’s Book, the author gives us a survival manual. After her twenty-five-year-old son dies unexpectedly, her life is so profoundly affected that even language is obliterated.

Fifteen minutes until visiting hours. Time dragged. Damien was sitting on the floor, his back leaning against the wall, trying to keep it together, waiting. On the other side of the wall, out on the street, people were burning trash. The smoky smell seeped inside the detention center. Damien sat in the corner furthest away from the door, next to the metal bars separating the cell from the people coming and going along the hallway. He was hoping to hide his face by moving to the back, but he knew that it was a pointless effort. Anyone could see him through the bars.

Rachel Monroe’s Savage Appetites is a book about motive. Monroe notes that though men dominate the world of violent crime—most perpetrators and victims of violent crime are men, she writes, as are most detectives and investigators and criminal attorneys—women make up the bulk of true-crime consumers. Monroe wants to understand why so many women are obsessed with true crime but she is not content with explanations that rely on women’s presumed pragmatism (i.e., that women watch or read true crime in order to avoid becoming victims). Instead, she suspects women find real pleasure in these stories. She writes that “perhaps we liked creepy stories because something creepy was in us.” Note that first-person-plural. Monroe is writing from inside the obsession. She is someone who is prone to what she calls “crime funks,” someone who has always been “murder-minded.” I could include myself in that “we” as well. I’ve seen every episode of Law and Order: SVU, am incredibly susceptible to the inertia of an all-night Forensic Files marathon even as I recognize the familiar beats of these shows, the formless buzz of anxiety that hovers as I take in these stories of assault, murder, and violence. The book, then, sets out to be a personal interrogation as well as a cultural critique, and I suspect that, like me, many readers will come to the book with some first-hand investment in Monroe’s findings.

Eva Lou is a Taiwanese-born, American-educated writer who has called Hawaii, New York, Seoul, and Paris home. She has a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University and an MFA in Writing from Columbia University. Lou’s short stories and poems have been anthologized in America and France. Her first collection of short stories, Rapture/d’extases, was published by Editions Lanore in France in a bilingual edition. Her novel-in-progress, QUIETUDE, is a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Award. She is the founder of Madeleine Editions, an international independent publishing house for children.

“Her performances have been enigmas to everyone so far,” says a character in Can Xue’s latest novel, Love in the New Millennium. She is talking about an opera singer, but her words sound just as apt as a descriptor for Can Xue’s experimental fiction: “Her songs aren’t about our past life, or about the emotional life of people today, but instead about the life we have never even imagined.” One of China’s most prominent novelists, Can Xue has called her work “literature of the soul.” Hers is a solo dance in the dark, a metaphysical picture of secular life that operates on its own elusive emotional logic. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen’s translation retains much of the zany humor from the Chinese while deftly easing readers into the meanings of names and idioms.