“The queen weeps under the trunk of a topiary elephant.” – Jeannie Vanasco
Jeannie Vanasco’s First Sentence: Jeannie Vanasco is a regular contributor to The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere.
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Sunday by Lauren Beukes: The author loves the story’s beginning, especially the implicit menace in such a mundane scene, which was taken almost verbatim from Cape Town’s Milnerton Market, but she finds the klepto house-hunting probably belongs to another story altogether.
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Survival Creativity by Joanne McNeil: Not quite a personal meditation, not quite a primer on contemporary creativity, this piece suggested itself as neither blog post nor article, but the author hopes it will be found of use, despite its uncategorizable nature.
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Dear S-, by Colin Dickey: The author was traveling with a copy of W. G. Sebald’s Vertigo, and went fishing for someone whose address he had handy and who would appreciate these ramblings. She never wrote him back, though she confessed, once, that she had started to write a response, but was soon overwhelmed by what she called the author’s “literary potlatch.” They lost touch soon after.
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The Laws That Govern by Umbreen Butt: This is not a typical Pakistani fiction; it features no mangoes.
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The Death of the Gadget Age by Brendan Byrne: Saddled with a strange, extremely short story which wasn’t really anywhere’s house-style, the author didn’t even bother querying the usual slush piles.
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Illustrations by Colette Johnson: Colette Johnson is a budding academic and amateur artist located in Seattle, WA. Her child-hood dream of becoming a “famous artist when [she] grew up” has not exactly come to fruition, but she still spends a lot of time making strange doodles in her notebooks and scribbling haphazardly on scraps of paper.