The Yale Review

5 welcome to a special fiction issue of The Yale Review. During the long days and (seemingly) short months of the pandemic, all of us at the journal found ourselves reading more fiction than ever before, perhaps to escape the grind of the news. In a moment when travel was not possible, transport still was. In a moment when ambiguity was sidelined, when leadership debased language, fiction reminded us of the essential ambiguities we all too often paper over or militate against. In this special issue, we are delighted to present six remarkable short stories. In these pages, you will read a debut short story by Jared Jackson, a writer of great talent; “Blanca” explores the life of an adolescent boy in Hartford, Connecticut, and is the first piece to be published from his collection in progress about residents of that city. You’llalsofindalateworkbytheItalianwriterAntonioTabucchi, who died in 2012, and who wrote a series of stories inspired by art; in “So Long,” translated by Elizabeth Harris, he responds to a work by the artist Tullio Pericoli. “The territory of writing is the imagination that goes beyond the image; it is the story of the pictures but also…the story of the unknown that surrounds them,” he wrote. “Ana and the Water,” by Carla Guelfenbein and translated by Nicole Bell, is set in the aftermath of the Chilean military coup of 1973; it offers a chilling, focused look at the ways violence changes everything we thought we understood about our lives. Jesse Ball is one of the most original writers at work today (a highly unoriginal way to express that sentiment, but why not say it plainly?); “Birthday” is a story I won’t forget. As he puts it in an interview in The Paris Review, Ball tries “to write very simply and clearly about things that are not a matter of consensus.” This is a writer who reminds us that so much of our days are propped up Editor's Note 6 by a kind of “groupthink” that obscures deeper realities lying right before us (as Guelfenbein does, in other ways). In “The Queen of Bark and Darkness,” Joanna Hershon delicately explores doppelgangers, betrayal, motherhood, and fear of what lies around us; the piece unfolds almost gently to its ending, which forcibly rearranges what the reader thought she understood. Irene Muchemi-­ Ndiritu, who was born in Nairobi, shares “The Blessing of Kali,” set in Kenya, an account of generational conflict that precisely captures postcolonial mores in a modernizing nation. Unsentimental, unflinching, the story contains a novel’s worth of event; devastation is almost too gentle a word for its ­ subtly managed conclusion. There are essays on fictions in our everyday lives—Kieran Setiya writes about finding companionship in the weirdness of H. P. Lovecraft’s short stories; Wendy S. Walters diagnoses American fictions of hospitality and trespass; and Erica Berry characterizes our narratives of climate guilt. Alongside all this there is a portfolio of photographs by Adolfo Kaminsky, better known for his work as a forger of identity papers—another kind of fiction, one that proved essential to saving many lives during the Second World War. We hope you’ll travel along with us—that you might enjoy, for a few moments, the worlds these writers have built. —meghan o’rourke ...