MÓNICA GOMERY
I’m a person who’s generally in love with the world, but it’s a complicated love, best embodied by the Hebrew word yirah, meaning both awe and fear. The two work in tandem—it’s the feeling of being filled to the brim with both wonder and heartbreak.

FERDINAND SCHMALZ
He, Franz Schlicht, considers his innermost self, his fundamental constitution, as that of what they call a bad character. Albeit he sees this as something he became. To put it precisely, he thinks of his own fate as having started out from one moment.

HANNAH GERSEN
In recent years, female filmmakers have been carving out a space for themselves in the American West, redefining a genre and a place that is has historically been depicted as the terrain of lonely male cowboys and vigilantes.

CAL SHOOK
The shade had always been down, the room always dark, and Ellis had assumed without consciously thinking it that the apartment was vacant. But tonight there was a warm light on. There was a music stand dead center in the window, and after a moment there was also a musician.

RAJOSIK MITRA
Some mellow, yellow rays of the sun fall at an angle on the pavement. The air smells of wet grass, earth, and rain that has recently died. I am probably coming back from somewhere. My father is holding my hand, he says, “Look at that Neel, look at that gold-mottled footpath.”

BRIDGET A. LYONS
My customary visual bearings don’t seem to be serving me here in Alice’s Arctic Wonderland, where even the most fundamental rules of spatial arrangement have been upended. I see liquid lying over land, tundra hovering in midair, and chunks of ice floating several feet above the sea.

ESTHER RAMÓN
Two of those brief animals / that populated the branches / and the furniture made useless / by humidity and neglect. / They were separated / From time that burns as it passes, / from this insignificance, / from the feeding cycle, / my desires in the shredded remains

KEIJA PARSSINEN
Saudi Camp began as a thatch-hut slum abutting the ritzier “American Camp,” which was built for the white American executives of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) in the middle of the twentieth century, when Americans flooded in…

JULIAN ZABALBEASCOA
A slight wind picks up and moves over the lake, clinking rocks together in the wash. Salvador squints into the darkness. The way his fellow construction workers talked about America’s proximity, he’d half expected to sight the faintest outline of one of its cities’ skylines…

CARIN CLEVIDENCE
My mother cuts the outboard motor. Over the slap of waves on the boat’s black pontoon, I hear the fur seals barking. The cliffs are dotted with white albatross. Seals sprawl along the rocky shoreline.