Hannah Gold
“Here Comes the Break” | On Literary Fiction Today
Hannah Gold
As we were preparing to launch this magazine, we told our first cohort of writers not to pitch us anything about contemporary fiction. We were bored by it, we said — mostly but not entirely tongue-in-cheek. This issue, we’re making an exception. It seems to us that the literary ground has shifted, and the forms and themes considered most exciting just a few years ago are now all but exhausted....
“Something Must Be Happening”
Hannah Gold
“What’s going on in contemporary fiction?” There’s no arguing with a question like that, it forces narrative. Something must be happening. The only way to answer it is to tell a story about thousands of stories based on the few you’ve managed to read. These days, there’s little overlap between what I and whomever I’m talking to are reading. I get all thrilled when it does happen, usually engineered through...
Parent Trap | Fiction
Hannah Gold
I. Early on in my publishing career, which was still early when it ended, I looked up what “congenial” means on my phone but it autofilled “congenital” into the dictionary due to prior use. In this way I came to believe “congenial” means having an essential condition or deformation present since birth. By the time I realized my mistake I’d already migrated from the world of reputable words to that...
How To Be Oblivious | Complacency and Doom in Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind
Hannah Gold
Social media didn’t invent apathy, but it has a particular genius for reproducing it. At times, scrolling through one’s feed feels like reading a rollicking, absorbing social novel, but in fragments, disordered, and with the reverse effect, since when you lose yourself in it, your interest goes too, and everything is vaguely similar: what you buy, what you owe, what tragedy befell someone else. Nestled among your preferred ideology, drama,...