The Dial‘s 31st issue, Fiction, is out now. Read at thedial.world
“Many of the stories in this issue take on the most visceral and direct aspects of the self — those that can’t be extinguished by any political event: love, caregiving, sex. In “The Melody,” Salomat Vafo describes a caretaker who has lost the old woman in her care; in “Hernando,” the narrator lusts after a young man working at her shop. Two works of science fiction, “Illegal Alien” and “The Cells” imagine other worlds from which to see this one. And in “Lift Up Your Hearts,” the Polish author Grzegorz Bogdał gives us a fable whose aggressive bleakness is almost exhilarating. (These stories are translated by Sabrina Jaszi, Kit Maude, Alex Zucker and Dawid Mobolaji.)
The stories, in their variety and style, offer a different vision for fiction, one that does not respond to the world so much as create its own images of it. For, if as we see every day, the world tosses up events beyond our wildest imagination, we still have some control over our own minds and thoughts. And in a very noisy world, there’s still power in the last word.”
Funds from The de Groot Foundation support writers contributing to The Dial.