Transcript: Liz DeWolf Podcast.
Liz DeWolf speaks to Emily Everett about her story “Ex Situ,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. The story follows an American living in Istanbul, navigating the end of a relationship, and the appeal and alienation of living abroad in a layered, complex city. She also discusses her process and revision methods, the themes she often returns to, and her work as a nonfiction book editor.
Curated by KEI LIM
With our spring issue hot off the press, check out these recommendations from three of the issue’s contributors: LIZ DEWOLF, ANDREW STEINER, and MARIA TERRONE.
Zach Williams’ Beautiful Days, recommended by Issue 31 contributor Liz DeWolf
I first came across Zach Williams’ work when I read his 2022 story “Wood Sorrel House” in The New Yorker. The story, in which a family arrives at a rental cabin and then forgets everything about their lives before, including how they got there, deeply unsettled me. Something about Williams’ careful, straightforward prose makes each disturbing revelation—The baby doesn’t age while the parents do! Food mysteriously appears in the freezer!—all the more destabilizing.
By LIZ DEWOLF
The buzzer rattles the empty room. Nearly empty—there’s the bed behind the wooden screen, the couch where Laurel sits in her underwear. Since Arda’s text that afternoon, she’s waited restlessly for him to arrive, imagining his route from where she lived with him on the Asian side of Istanbul to her new apartment on the European side: the narrow streets down to the ferry station, the boat churning through silver water, the near-vertical climb to her sixth-floor walkup in Beyoğlu. She presses the button that unlocks the building’s entrance and decides not to get dressed.
Arda enters her apartment without knocking. “Mutlu yıllar,” he says, though it’s now several weeks into 2013. For the first time since Laurel’s lived in Turkey, they didn’t celebrate the New Year together.
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