the minetta review
Established in 1974, The Minetta Review is a literary and arts publication managed by undergraduate students at New York University. After a brief hiatus, Minetta was relaunched in 2023 by Julia E. Mejia and Ananya Chibber.
Book Design and Layout by Samantha Esmé Williams and Ananya Chibber. All rights reserved to the contributor, whose authorization is required for reprints.
Contact: minettareviewmag@gmail.com
Cover art by Samantha Esmé Williams
Letter from the Editor
PROSE
Ket Guy
Lex Garcia
Fallen
Melanie Zhang
POETRY
LATCHKEY
Tiffany Leong
Pulp
Tessa Ehrlich
ECLIPSES ARE GOOD FOR BUSINESS
Ranina Simon
Park With Dai
Angel Moon
ART
The Fear
Melly Mejia
The Jester
Melly Mejia
INTERVIEW
Letter from the Editor
Dear reader,
It’s been a year since the relaunch of The Minetta Review, and our Fall 2024 issue continues last year’s commitment to uplifting talented literary voices. This issue’s prose and poetry section begins with a portrait of an eccentric ex and ends with an evocation of a walk in the park with a friend. These pieces, striking in their vivid specificity, bookend a series of equally memorable scenes, characters, and images. Following these, you will find words by Elif Batuman, who I had the privilege of interviewing. Our conversation about literature and life is one I’ve frequently thought about since, and it’s one I’m excited to share with you here.
I’d like to thank our editorial board for the time and care they put into this issue. In particular, the production of this issue would have been impossible without our Managing Editor, Kathy Ngo. I feel immensely grateful to have a managing editor with whom I can share both submission commentary and trivia prizes—that is to say, I’m very lucky to work with such a great editor and friend.
Lastly, thank you to our readers for trusting The Minetta Review with your time and attention. The editors of this magazine are familiar with the joy of reading the right thing at the right moment. It’s what we search for when we select pieces for publication, and it’s what we hope you will encounter, reading them.
Warmly,
Ananya Chibber Editor-in-Chief of The Minetta Review
Ket Guy
Lex Garcia
He is known colloquially as “Ket Guy.” This is because he used to go out with my friend Lacey, and on their first date he offered her ketamine, the dissociative anesthetic/horse tranquilizer/pastime. The original plan was to do ketamine with him, but he was between plugs, something he apologized profusely for. Nevertheless, the absence of ket was just as strong a force as the presence of it. When I met him in Elephant and Castle, outside his LCC dorm, I shook his hand and he said his name was Josiah. I told him I knew him by a different name. A prolonged silence followed. He was unaware of his Ket Guy nickname. I tried to convince him it was a term of endearment.
Ket Guy had long hair, parted down the middle; half of it was dyed black and the other half was dyed red. An acceptable amount of light brown stubble. Distressed black jeans. A Rage Against the Machine t-shirt. Chipped painted nails. He was bursting with energy, telling Lacey about a bad date he went on last weekend. Their relationship interested me. She said they’d both settled on being friends, though something in me is skeptical of the myth of the mutual breakup.
His room was small. A bed, a desk, a curling paperback Trotsky on the Communist Manifesto Today. A shower with no curtain. A Tintin print by his monochromatic wardrobe. At one point he made us all watch the video for Rage Against the Machine’s “Sleep Now in Fire,” where they perform on Wall Street. “It’s directed by Michael Moore, you know.” I asked why the white guy had dreadlocks. “It’s okay when he does it.” We talked about the upcoming US election. He encouraged me to vote Green Party; “That’s the only way they’ll start to pay attention!” He took us to The Underworld, an aptly
named Camden alt-rock club. They played at ear-splitting volume AC/DC and Soundgarden and Twenty-One Pilots and a metal cover of “Voulez-Vous.” The pit was populated by sparse, static bubbles of strange-looking people. A sweaty millennial couple in fishnets making out. A skinny middle-aged man in a security jacket swaying by himself. A muscular guy with hair like Fabio, going around to different groups trying to get them to dance like one of those guys hired to get the party going at Bar Mitzvahs. Ket Guy seemed to thrive in this environment. I viewed him in anesthetized slow motion, vibrating and undulating, lifted by the crunchy power chords, bouncing his dye-damaged hair back and forth like the tendrils of a sea anemone, eyes closed to everything around him. Afterwards, we smoked cigarettes outside (Ket Guy rolls his own) and he apologized for it being so lame. “It’s not normally like this.” I nodded. We went back in and I took as much as I could stomach and then had a drink and left without saying goodbye. There’s a level of hopefulness required to be able to stay at a club like that. A sincere faith that more people will come, that Fabio will stop harassing you, that the music will soon suck less. That the abyss you find yourself in will not stay this way forever. The Ket Guy brand of radical optimism, at least without the assistance of ketamine, is not for me.
Fallen
Melanie Zhang
It wasn’t the body that had ruined everything. Bodies fell from the mountains from time to time, tumbling down into the foothills in the springtime as the weather warmed and the snow shifted and melted. It was usually an errant mountaineer or a child who had wandered up into the mountains and never came home when their mother called, people from so long ago that no one knew who they were or to whom they belonged. Tragic, yes, but never something to take note of; the bodies were always simply sent down the road to town, to be buried in the cemetery under a secondhand name, wherever there was still room.
No, the issue was that it had been nine-year-old Ela who’d found the body and cried out, and her father who had hauled it into the village, in front of his own house, to set on a wagon and take into town, and her mother who had run screaming out of the house, another child’s name on her tongue.
Lina, she had shrieked, eyes wide, frantic and fearful and relieved all at once. Lina Lina Lina, like an incantation, a plea, a reunion. That was the moment when everything unraveled.
The body—a girl, hardly older than six—had lain encased in ice for nearly a century, possibly more, arms and legs tucked into herself, hands tightly clasped. Matted patches of hair draped over her face, sparkling with ice crystals and tiny droplets of water. At first glance, she seemed to be only sleeping, about to wake at any moment. Her body was bundled in some old, ragged fabric, which they peeled back to confirm that yes, she was truly dead. There was an audible gasp when they saw her face, eyes closed and expression oddly peaceful. The child must
have frozen to death, someone said, likely died of exposure up in the mountains or was caught in a storm on her way back from playing out too late. Poor child, but nothing to be done now—must’ve been years ago, and the parents were already dead and gone or too old now to remember losing her. All that was left to do was to take her away to be buried.
No one knew who spoke first, who gave her the name. Perhaps it was mocking, a cruel joke made at the expense of a father who’d lost a daughter so young. Perhaps they simply thought that it was poetic. But by the time the wagon was readied and the body was set on an old blanket, ready to be loaded, the entire village seemed to thrum with the same name.
Lina, they said, and looked at the body, then up at the house with the second room no one entered. It was a name that had figured in their cautionary tales—don’t go outside too late at night, don’t go where your mother cannot find you—and before that, their quiet prayers for a time. Ela’s father glanced at his house, then back down at the body. “We have to go,” he told the men around him. “As fast as possible. Before she—”
He shook his head and reached for the blanket on the ground. “We have to go,” he said again, and didn’t glance up this time. He was just reaching for the blanket, to finally put the body in the wagon, when he heard an audible gasp behind him.
She had become a mystery to the village since she’d vanished nine years ago. But his wife’s face was unmistakable when she emerged from the house, eyes flashing, wild with pain or hope or something else. No one had heard her speak in years, and her voice seemed to come to him from far away, from years ago, from a past when she used to call in a child—another one—the exact same way, only filled with joy instead of frenzy. Lina, she was saying. Lina, Lina Lina.
And he stared at her, frozen to the ground, and watched helplessly as she seized the girl laying on the dusty ground—body and blanket altogether—and ran with the bundle back into the house.
Ela had always been the type to disappear. Perhaps because she’d been born nearly a month too early, she was a thin, wiry child with too-big eyes and a too-sharp chin. She rarely drew attention to herself and had a bad habit of forever tucking herself into corners and looking into halfshut doors and waiting for someone to look her way, but she soon learned to live with a corpse.
Other than the smell and the swathes of flies—both of which grew more and more noticeable as the weeks went on—it was rather pleasant. The house had two rooms, and Ela had only ever known one. But for the first time, her mother’s door was almost always open. Even when it was closed, she could hear faint humming throughout the day and at odd hours in the night, and sometimes the sound of singing, some old folk song she had never heard her mother sing before. But when it was open, Ela could watch as her mother carried the other girl about the room, fussing over her and whispering stories and smiling. Sometimes, the two would even venture outside, though always at night after their first excursion had resulted in a neighbor’s child screaming at the sight. A trunk that had sat on a shelf all decade had been brought down and its contents—colorful dresses, hats, scarves, and other such articles—were now strewn across her mother’s bed or draped around the other girl’s body. Hairstyling was short-lived, however, because the girl’s hair had a propensity to fall out at the slightest tug, and the floor was sprinkled with hairs that would be carefully collected and replaced on the girl’s head. It even became normal to see her mother at meals, although she hardly ate. Instead, she preferred to slip bites
of food into the other girl’s hollow mouth along with whispered endearments, even if the food inevitably fell out or through and landed on the floor. It was a sight Ela soon resolved not to stare at—with horror or with envy, she didn’t know. Several times while they sat at the kitchen table after dinner, listening to her mother crooning a lullaby to the girl, Ela watched as her father shook his head and moved to get up, only to sit back down again.
“I’m sorry,” he said to her every time. “But how can I take this from her?”
Ela understood what he meant. Seeing her mother sitting there at the table and beaming at the girl in her arms was such a strange thing but not an unwelcome one, even though the house reeked more day by day. She spoke to no one else, her gaze passing neutrally over Ela as if she wasn’t there. But one time she bent down to press a kiss to the girl’s forehead, then turned to her husband, and it was easy to overlook the slime that coated her lips with how radiant her smile was. This woman who had once barricaded the door to her bedroom so that Ela could not enter, who refused to look at her even when she emerged, who didn’t even seem to recognize her name. This mother—her mother—this woman of sorrow and silence and sleep. This woman who now, with a corpse in her arms, looked into her husband’s eyes and laughed.
Then spring turned to summer and the stench became unbearable, inside or out. The neighbors complained that their animals had stopped grazing, that their children were being pestered by the flies that had congregated. No woman had any business carting around a dead body like a child, and no husband had any business standing by as she did it.
Each time, Ela watched as her father nodded, and shook hands gravely with the latest concerned neighbor. She watched him steel himself every time his wife approached, the girl in her arms. But each time, he would
hesitate once he sat next to his wife, the body in her arms within reach, sagging and oozing. Time and time again, he could only shake his head and watch her go.
It all came to a head one afternoon as Ela sat in her usual corner, swatting at flies. One of the neighbors stood across the room, talking to her father in grave tones, when her mother opened the door and emerged from her room singing, the girl in her arms. It was so rotted that it barely held together, face caved in and one arm just barely attached. The neighbor started back at the stench, but reached for her nevertheless.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but—” and started back when she slapped him across the face and ran, still clutching the girl, back into her room. In her haste, the precariously attached arm fell and was left behind on the floor. The door slammed shut. Ela looked to her father, who seemed utterly defeated, then to the neighbor, who merely pursed his lips, then turned and looked about the room with interested eyes.
His gaze finally settled on an axe by the door. Ela stared at him as he hefted it, heard the first few thudding blows of iron against wood then the sound of splintering and frantic, heavy footsteps, heard her mother’s screams and sobs, and ran.
They brought out the wagon again, ignoring the shrieking sobs emanating from the house. The body was loaded. The wagon began to drive away. Ela’s father crouched beside the body, watching. In the last moment, he saw his wife burst through the door, eyes wild, and watched as Ela wrestled with all her strength to hold back her mother from chasing after him. Her mother, who hardly looked down to see what was stopping her flight, who was still sobbing, screaming, for her daughter, for Lina Lina Lina.
The Fear
Melly Mejia
LATCHKEY
Tiffany Leong
Last July was soaked in hot oil. We’d during the night with fists clenched.
Mondays we would wake up and eat Eggos while CBS told us all the bad
A
T LEAST FORTY PEOPLE SHOT SIX CASUALTIES OVER A DOZEN CRITICALLY NOW HOSPITALIZED AND NOW FOR TRAFFIC, JIM? COMING INBOUND ON THE
Toaster’s smoking. Forgot to unplug
Through the day the old couch would groan under our afternoon bodies. I reread the same two books all summer.
The venetian blinds became more and more slightly off kilter with each day. afternoons we grew hot and lazy and didn’t talk in case the noise got too In the summer our piano never played right, the heat slowed the keys down
FUCK MORNINGS I WAKE UP THRASHING CHEST BURNING WITH THE UGLIEST I SWIPE OLD FRIENDS’ THEM SWIPE MARY
I ONLY GOT PART-TIME ONLY GOT WESTSIDE
We’d sleep clenched. On eat soggy bad news:
SHOT THIS WEEKEND…
CRITICALLY INJURED JIM?
DAN RYAN… unplug it. would summer. and day. In the and warm. played down too. I THRASHING BLANKETS
UGLIEST YEARNING FRIENDS’ STORIES
MARY JANE EARNINGS PART-TIME SHIFTS, WESTSIDE EARNINGS;
WE GET HUNGRY FASTER PARENTS AREN’T AROUND CORNER STORE THERE 24/7 WE LURK ALL
But when the sun set we raced to put our sneakers. Dark always turned a on us. Shoelaces tied too quickly bits static sparked from them. Last breath summer; every teenager in the world opened their mouth wide towards the
NOW WE RUN INTO SMOKE, BOYS IN THE GIRLS TOO GROWN—TWIRL YOU CRUMBLE THAT WE’RE TWO INCHES
Before things like fear, pain, heartbreak, death, taxes, we knew this taste fresh. Before anything we were full on light.
THIS SUMMER IS REBIRTH. my breath and tangle my hair in fist. This summer is community and broken barbed wire, shaved and car-seats broiled to the ass-scorching max.
FASTER WHEN OUR AROUND THERE FOR A REASON SEASON put on switch bits of breath of world the sun.
INTO THE HUMID DARK THE PARK GROWN—TWIRL HAIR, ACT SMART, THAT GREEN ‘TIL INCHES APART. heartbreak, fresh. light. REBIRTH. I hold in your community pool shaved ice
YOU ON THE INTERSECTION SOMETHING IN MY NOT THE SLURPEE THAT MAKES MY GUT TRY TO HIDE THE STENCH BLOCK-WIDE AFFECTION TOO LATE, SPILLED
FUCK MORNINGS NOT POP TARTS BURNING AND YET I REGARD WITH THE MOST BITTERSWEET
IT’S NOT LOVE BUT GOD DOES DO A GOOD JOB. You know flash of hot when you feel it. You know when hands grip tight and lines of your palm are pinched you are the first skin someone ever touched. You know how late summer comes in hurricanes, roaring beneath sewers, down the drain. fast to the brim, these feelings. don’t feel full when we eat too It’s not love but it’s the same way can’t hear voices underwater, only see the salvages of air. We escape the heat on the weekdays at the community center. Gravel crackles our flip-flops. The pool is barely twenty something yards wide but when we jump into the water the world is vast, bleached, probably
INTERSECTION MY CHEST UNFURLS
GUT CURL STENCH OF A AFFECTION
SPILLED THE BLUE CONFECTION
NOT ENOUGH TIME BURNING
REGARD YOU AND SUMMER BITTERSWEET YEARNING DOES IT the You and the pinched like has late roaring drain. It’s feelings. We too fast. way you only escape the crackles barely but the probably full
of kid-piss, but mostly, it is large unobtainable and we stay there. fight to keep our heads below as as possible just because we can, because we can’t. I’m grappling your ankle somewhere or maybe you’re snatching at my wrist or the water has merged us into one body. I like that idea and I float
Someone told me if you make at the deepest part of the sea it’ll come true. We try it but the pool doesn’t even go five feet deep. it but at some point surface breaks. I’m getting out now and freaking some fucking children stole our towels. Looking back:
It’s not love but God, does it do
You, in the water, steal
large and there. We as long can, or grappling for maybe or maybe one float in it. a wish it’ll pool deep. We try breaks. freaking ‘cus our
do a good job. Looking back: steal another breath.
Pulp Tessa Ehrlich
It could have started like this. I love society and my old friends ask for me back. We brim in something else, the absence of an envelope exists under other people’s pines. We clutch mustard flowers and floss each other’s teeth with the stems.
Remember how your shorts matched the orange juice, how we lived in wooden rooms, air too sweet for sleeping apart, and we did it Nevertheless.
Two plum pickers, sucking on the same syllable, hands stuck in our shirt sleeves and feet stuck in our mouths. We saved a few seats at the table and gargled with the pulp.
I spent a dollar sixty-six on international
Stamps. It’s time, I’m afraid to pay me back.
ECLIPSES ARE GOOD FOR BUSINESS
Ranina Simon
the old asian man selling bongs on his little plastic folding table swaps his cig for an ultra sunrise monster, lets the orange electrify all the tobacco debris in his mouth. hyperpop blasts from his electric scooter. his waist is cinched into white slacks. yellow stripes race down his leather sleeves. he is roguishly dressed for the apocalypse. when the moon squares up to that ball of pain and heat in the sky he’ll tilt his face in the direction of their fight. his customers smoke to forget how far these things are from their reach. they smoke like how they munch popcorn at a theatre, like a paying audience. the moon is their underdog, and they’ve placed bets. no one is good at letting things happen to them. (even planetary events.) behind his aviators the old man’s eyes already bloom with cataracts. he slurps his monster and contemplates if he’ll keep them closed.
Park with Dai Angel Moon
I’m at the park with you. We’re at the park: Dai, or day, for Daisy, and Son, or sun, for Alison. It’s Thursday between classes and I’m at the park with you.
“Have you seen the pigeon man,” you say, “he controls the pigeons. He screams ‘UP!’and they go up and he screams “AROUND!’ and they go around— look at them now—” pigeons sweep into the sky, cawing like doom, circling then settling down like the feathers they’re made of, one aims for your hair and I cover you, tuck you beneath my arms. You resurface and I stare at your labret-lips; for a moment I think maybe then a woman pushes a microphone to them instead: “Could we interview you about menstrual cycles?”
“No,” you say, and she leaves us with non-FDA-approved PMS-pills. We contemplate throwing them away, then say we should drive up to Vermont or somewhere far and take them all at once, together. We pocket them and chainsmoke Raisons for now.
I say, “I have to pee.”
You say, “sometimes when I have to pee I don’t, as punishment.” I say, “I think of you once a day as punishment.”
Once a day, Dai.
It’s cold at this park that I’m at with you and you shiver all violent and vulnerable which worries me but you’re laughing and laughing and suddenly I’m laughing too, leaning toward you, cig ash snowflaking the cold air, the mystery-pills rattle in our jackets and the pigeons scream up and around and I lean toward you, look at you, Sun at Day, it’s Thursday between classes and I’m at the park with you.
The Jester Melly Mejia
False
Either/Ors: A Conversation With Elif Batuman Ananya Chibber
My copy of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot never quite closes, in the way that paperback covers tend to detatch from a book’s front page after being picked up enough times. The pages are textured with creases from dog-ears and the bumps of pencil underlinings. It’s a novel that commands attentive reading. As Batuman’s narrator, Selin, navigates her first year of college, her experiences are described with a specificity that captures the tumult of everyday life. In one scene, Selin interprets the feeling of anxiety so pervasive in airports: “Walking through security was like dying: The way you had to say goodbye to everyone, the way you became just your name on a sheet of paper and gave up your money and your watch and your shoes.” It’s moments like this that epitomize what The Idiot and Either/Or do so memorably: evoke and defamiliarize the most universal experiences through precise, surprising sentences. Since reading these books for the first time, I’ve found myself returning to them whenever I want to feel optimistic about the capacities of language.
Elif was kind enough to meet with me on Zoom this fall, answering my questions about her books and the current literary landscape. The following conversation addresses the ever-elusive notion of plot, ticking clocks, and the eternal question: Have we been doomed by the novel?
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
AC: The Idiot and Either/Or are both set at Harvard University in the 1990s. Teaching at a university now, do you feel that campus culture, particularly in the humanities, has shifted since The Idiot was set?
EB: I’m both surprised sometimes by how different it is and by how unchanged it is. Some percentage of the students have read my books about college in the ‘90s, and they resonate with them, and I’ve been surprised about how they resonate with people who are in school now. I hear from them that certain things haven’t changed, or that certain dynamics haven’t changed. Among people in their forties, or middle-aged people, when you talk about teaching, they’re like, “Oh, the students are gonna be so woke. You can’t say anything around them,” but it doesn’t feel like that at all. It’s kind of weird to remember how foreign middle-aged people seemed when I was in my twenties, and now it’s the people in their twenties who seem foreign, but actually, people are just people. Sometimes I find myself sort of running ideas by the students, like, “What do you think about that?” And then I look at their faces, and they’re like, “I don’t know what I think about that!” I feel very lucky to have this confrontation with another point of the human experience in time.
AC: Do you think the rise of autofiction is changing our collective understanding of plot and narrative in the novel?
EB: There are a lot of questions I have about plot. One is, to what extent does one read for plot, even when one thinks they are reading for plot? I have a friend who is doing screenwriting, and I remember him asking about A Clockwork Orange, which is something that one thinks of as a very plot-driven movie. And he’s like, “But if you find someone who says ‘I love A Clockwork Orange’ and you ask them, ‘What do you love about it,’ they’re probably not going to remember all the beats in the plot, they’re going to remember the feeling that it gave them.” So maybe the plot is like the motor, or like one of those trams that they used to have at parks or zoos, that gets you
into the world and lets you just keep moving while you look around.
With Either/Or, it’s definitely autobiographical enough to count as autofiction, and it doesn’t quite have a plot quite like A Clockwork Orange has a plot, but it does have a three-act structure. I would find it very hard to write something from scratch in the three-act structure, but once you already have a scene or a story in your mind, which is the case with autofiction, there’s probably a beginning and an end. Then you can say, in that, what’s the high point, what’s the low point, what’s the dark night of the soul? It becomes much easier to kind of manipulate that stuff. Which is to say, it’s kind of a cliche, but writing nonfiction involves just as much structuring and narrative and plotting as writing fiction does, and autofiction is the same.
AC: Plot is often talked about in formulaic terms, with a rising action, climax, and resolution. Maybe our understanding of what these things are can change with autofiction, because the narrative tends to look more static.
EB: Yeah, an autofiction novel might have a ticking clock, where someone feels like they have to do something before a certain time, which is the actual ticking clock that we live with, whereas the ticking clock in a plotted novel will be like an actual bomb that’s about to go off. So it involves some kind of translation, where the ticking clocks are represented in each kind of novel by their equivalents. The reason we probably enjoy reading about the ticking clock in the plotted novel is because it reminds us of this more toned-down version that we all experience.
AC: Either/Or takes its name from Kierkegaard’s book of the same title, and in your novel, Selin thinks a lot about
what it would mean to live an ethical or an aesthetic life. What do you think of her understanding of Kierkegaard’s ethical/aesthetic dichotomy?
EB: Selin and Svetlana are very taken with this idea of the aesthetic versus the ethical, and I do think it’s fun to break things into categories. You can do it in a gazillion different ways, and categories like that are potentially fun and useful. Now, as an adult, when I read that book, the consensus interpretation of the book is that Kierkegaard himself does not believe that either the aesthetic or the ethical is right, and in his case, he thinks the only way to live is religious, actually. At the time I was writing Either/ Or, the version of the aesthetic and the ethical that made the most sense to me was from Simone De Beauvoir’s book, The Ethics of Ambiguity, which is mentioned in the reading list at the end. I was thinking that all of the things Selin thinks she has to choose between are false either/ors, and this series of false either/ors are what lead her into these increasingly painful situations. Simone De Beauvoir would say that you think you can live an aesthetic life without ethical considerations, but actually you can’t because an aesthetic life is a life where you’re free, but you can’t be free while other people are unfree, and you can’t live an ethical life, because you have to be making decisions from scratch, each time. That said, I think there are some situations where that choice makes sense as a sort of short-hand. My intention when I wrote the book was to try to portray the either/ors that are in Selin’s mind as sort of artificial and not conducive to a healthy way of life.
AC: You’ve spoken in interviews about how the novel can depoliticize the reader. Do you think this depoliticization is something that can shift, or is it inherent to the novel as a form?
EB: I think both. I think people are mindful about it, and
you can thematize it in the novel itself. The idea I had a couple of years ago, when Either/Or came out, was that novels aestheticize difficult situations. You see a lot of structural injustice against women and poor people and the serf class in a book like Anna Karenina, and because that book is surrounded by an aura of literariness, it starts to feel sort of reified and static, and in that sense, it can be depoliticizing. I used to think that what we value in literature is a kind of moral complexity, and that if it was very clear who was right and who was wrong, then that would make for an artistically bad novel. But there’s a way that when you really represent gray areas and moral ambiguities, then you kind of end up being like, “Well, there are good people on both sides, the problems that we have are part of this rich tapestry of the human condition where we can’t possibly tease them apart.” It can lead to a feeling that it’s not worth it or possible to fix anything, and the only correct attitude to have towards all the problems in the world is this world-weary observation of the humane characteristics that are on every side of a situation.
I remember I was listening to an interview with Jason Rezaian, a journalist who spent a long time in a prison in Iran. This was a while ago. He was describing some of the interactions he had with different prison guards, and some of them were kind of funny and humane. They would joke around, and there was some kindness in that, some joy. And I found myself getting sentimental about the funny guards, and about how these connections could be made, even under such circumstances. Like: “Wow, such is the richness and complexity of human experience.” And that felt dangerous. Like somewhere in there is the thought, “How can we say that prison isn’t all bad, when it enables these transcendent moments with the guards.” And this felt novelistic to me. So many great novels work by making you cherish these beautiful moments of kindness
and humor that can arise between people inside these hugely unjust social systems—and the kindness is amplified by the awfulness of the system. I do think it’s important to be able to appreciate those human moments. But it’s also important to remember that nobody should be in prison, you know?
That said, I believe novels are incredibly flexible, and can accommodate all of this political content—you can put this whole conversation in the novel, and it would survive and thrive there. That’s good and bad: it’s good because the novel is always changing, and it’s bad because once things go into the novel, it’s sort of like capitalism, they become commodified and lose their power. So then the novel is doing this thing where it invokes some hand-wringing about the novel and then it goes back to business as usual. I guess the only solution is what Simone De Beauvoir says, which is to be constantly vigilant, because everything is changing all the time.
Contributors’ Notes
Lex Garcia is a senior at the Tisch School of the Arts majoring in Collaborative Arts with a focus on filmmaking and experimental theatre. His work has previously been published in NYU Baedeker and The Greene Street Review. He is very grateful to be included.
Melanie Zhang is a junior at NYU majoring in English and History. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, baking, and petting her roommates’ cats.
Tiffany Leong is a senior studying Interactive Media and Business at NYU Shanghai. She is currently Editor-inChief of ZEEN*, a student-run art collective. You can find her other works on The Maine Review, West 10th, and Confluence. For more, check out her TikTok/Tumblr @ syutji.
Tessa Ehrlich is a current undergraduate student at NYU. More of her work can be found in Spires Magazine, Rainy Day Magazine, and Twenty on Substack.
Ranina Simon is a junior from Jakarta and DC. She studies English on the Creative Writing track and Journalism. On any given day she can be found reading, drastically changing her appearance, and listening to music with aggressive guitar riffs.
Angel Moon, based in New York City, is a fiction writer who comes from poetry. They recently graduated from New York University and are currently working on their first novel. Their writing explores Borderline Personality Disorder, queerness, and the Asian American experience. In addition to reading and writing, they enjoy figure drawing, yearning, and thinking about the past.
Melly Mejia is an Afro-Latina artist currently attending NYU Gallatin where she studies the intersections of Art and Technology and its effects on urban youth. Born and raised in the Bronx, Melly discovered her passion for art at a young age and has been honing her craft ever since. With a focus on themes of black femininity and identity, Melly’s art endeavors to unveil the burdensome weight of unrealistic societal expectations placed upon black women, as they navigate the complexities of the world and their emotions.
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
MASTHEAD
MANAGING EDITOR
PROSE EDITORS
POETRY EDITORS
ART EDITOR
COPY EDITOR
Ananya Chibber
Kathy Ngo
Lola Bosa
Madison Li
Amaya Jones
Kaamya Krishnan
Shaan Manocha
Samantha Esmé Williams
Whitney Sederberg