Editors’ Note
Issue 7: Fiction
AUGUST 1, 2023
Summer is for taking a step back from daily life, enjoying the days that seem to linger longer than they should and, if we are lucky, indulging in a little leisure. This month we bring you our fiction issue, composed almost entirely of short stories that we have brought into English for the first time, a collection of imagined worlds to supplement your summer reading.
In “Marina Fun,” a short story written by the Spanish writer Ariadna Castellarnau and translated by Adrian Nathan West, a merman disrupts the nuclear family. “Notebooks,” by the Chilean writer Mariá José Navia and translated by Lily Meyer, tells the story of a woman who, in an effort to put as much geographical and emotional distance between herself and the site of a fraught relationship, ends up at a remote scientific research station.
The Iraqi novelist Shahad Al Rawi brings us her story, “On Jumhuriya Bridge,” translated by Sawad Hussain, about two siblings who witness the American evacuation from Iraq and wonder what will come next. Chloe Aridjis, a Mexican-American writer, brings us a curious story about the frazzled characters who attend the “International Lightning Strike Survivor Conference.” We are proud to bring you poems from the Cuban writer Wendy Guerra’s new collection, “Delicates,” translated into English by Nancy Naomi Carlson and Esperanza Hope Snyder.
We also have a fascinating reported essay from the Brazilian writer Alejandro Chacoff about his encounters with Jorge Luis Borges’s widow and sole heir, María Kodama. As Chacoff writes, “Everyone approached her only to talk about Borges, and she offered up her neck to them, assuming medium-like airs, trying to extend her powers of representation beyond her legal role.”
Finally, we've compiled a list of summer reads and musings from Dial contributors, because reading in conversation with others is really the only way to live.
— The Editors