Anonymous is the unknown author of the fifty four stanzas of the Fatrasies d’Arras. Along with the eleven stanzas written by Philippe de Rémi, these comprise the total corpus of the poetic form known as the “fatrasie,” written sometime between the years 1250 and 1300. Philippe de Rémi, a knight at the court of the Countess Mahaut, in Arras, is believed to have invented the form alone. But the form immediately lent itself to the kinds of collaborative writing practices— collaborative poems, game poems, competition poems—that were a sensation in Arras of the period. The consensus today is that the Fatrasies d’Arras were written by an unidentified coterie of virtuosic poets, who interpreted Rémi’s invention as a generative structure, one which could permit an infinite number of combinations from a finite set of rules. The exact mechanics of the writing procedure are not known. One poet may have provided some aspect of the finished poem—the rhyme words, for example, or the first six lines, or the pattern of paradoxes—and a second poet may have filled in the rest. Or perhaps they were written by circles of 11 poets, with one poet responsible for each line, in a procedure not-too-distantly analogous to the Surrealists’ cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse).

It is perhaps a few days—three, to be exact—after her brother had called. They’d found her mother’s body. She’d been dead since Sunday.

“No!” she’d yelled. It really made no sense. No sense at all, she’d seen her mother days ago; she’d watched her mother’s disapproval of those expensive Parmesan crisps she’d bought melt into pleasure as they munched them with their coffee. Her mother was really a different woman.

We sit in the sauna talking, my baby brother and me. He’s twelve years younger, a serious just-turned-ten.

“More water on the rocks?” I ask. I peek up through yellowed light to the temperature gauge. It’s 75 Celsius, not as hot as we usually keep it. Even at 100 our grandparents won’t get out to cool off. We are Finnish, this is what our people do, have always done.

Around three years ago, I felt a general sense of unease invade my being. It seemed that everyone around me, including strangers on the internet, possessed a core set of beliefs and values and I did not. I grew up in India and then moved to the United States for college and graduate school. The individualistic culture of the American college environment presented a stark contrast to my upbringing. It took me a while to realize that something different was expected of me in the U.S. I could no longer rely on straightforward adherence to the values of the collective. I instead had to develop my own unique system of values, my own beliefs about what is right and wrong, what is just and unjust. What a drag, I thought.

Dressing, not stuffing. That’s a distinction she clings to even after all these years up north. Her worn hands crumble cornbread and white bread together over a mixing bowl, skin papery, veins dark. Martha has been fascinated lately with her veins. Dark, protruding, obvious—they seem so very exposed. She pokes one, and watches it roll around on her wrist like a pitiful snake. Dave had loved her dressing.

Yi held his keys in his hand, ready to leave, but Crystal was blocking his way.

“You’re lying,” she said.

“Sweetheart,” he said. “I’m on my way to meet Alberto. We can talk when I get back.”

“I called the office yesterday. Alberto said you hadn’t been in all day.”

Jenny Slate is overwhelmed, and very sweet. Her book Little Weirds came out this month shortly after her Netflix special, “Stage Fright,” and an engagement announcement. Little Weirds is made up of micro-essays, sketches and fairy-sized windows into Slate’s mind. The collection hovers around a time in Slate’s life when being alive became joyless, painful and lonely in the worst way. At times, the book flits about too much, jumping into the surreal without warning. It’s disorienting. But when Slate hits a truth, which she does again and again, her perspective asserts itself with a gentle, earnest: Here I am!

“Hello.” This time it was a sing-songy voice, twinkling with melody. They were all so different and yet, somehow, few sculpted a mental image in Diana’s mind. With each hello, she heard suggestions of the words that would follow, but often she saw only the gray of the screen, the purple logo, and the highlighted row of the call list.

Amitav Ghosh is an Indian author of international acclaim who came to the world’s attention with the publication of his first novel, The Circle of Reason. The book was awarded France’s prestigious Prix Médicis étranger. He went on to author the Ibis trilogy, which includes Sea of Poppies, a novel short-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize. Ghosh’s work is known for exploring the themes of love, loss, communal violence, tradition and memory. His novels are predominantly historical, and typically populated with characters whose stories stretch across geographical boundaries and span the world, yet his home town of Calcutta and the influence of Bengali culture are never obscured. Ghosh’s background as a historian and an anthropologist is evident in his writing and in the meticulous research that precedes every novel, yet his mastery lies in being able to capture the human condition through epic periods in history.

Love of Distance

I remember when I was in my mother’s house,

in the middle of the plain,

I had a window that looked out

over the meadows; at the end, the woody embankment

hid the Ticino and, beyond that,

there was a dark strip of hills.

Then I hadn’t seen the sea

but that one time, but I kept for it

a fierce nostalgia of the lover.

Toward evening I used to stare at the horizon;

I’d narrow my eyes a little; caress

the contours and the colors between my eyelashes;

and the strips of hills would stretch out,

flickering, blue: it seemed to me the sea

and I liked it more than the true sea.

Milan, 24 April, 1929

For nearly 50 years, Lydia Davis has been producing short stories, novels, translations, and essays that try to say as much as possible in as few words as possible. She is considered the master of flash fiction, and some of her stories need only two sentences to leave a lasting mark. Her preoccupation with brevity, she says in her new book, Essays One, stems from her experiences writing poetry as an adolescent. But, at some point growing up, Davis realized that being a poet would not be a suitable profession for her. She didn’t want to be a novelist either, so she adopted short fiction as a way of channeling poetic energy. In Essays One, Davis’s talents as a writer of both poetic and prosodic tendencies are on full display.

My sign turns heads. Some cars slow, most pass but all read.

TO

WAR

VIA LA

USMC

Boldface caps spaced wide on thick gray poster board that won’t bend in wind, backed by a flat board long enough to hoist sign higher than head. Legible for eyes approaching fast, or stopped at a traffic light with me standing half a football field ahead on right.

I came back from Vietnam with a chest full of medals and a head full of nightmares, a full-blown case of post-traumatic stress disorder, the dreaded PTSD. I can’t count the number of times I’ve woken up from a deep sleep in the middle of the night and sat bolt upright in bed, dripping with sweat, my body tense, tingling all over, knowing I was about to die, reliving the worst moment in my life as if it were happening right now, instead of happening long ago in a place far, far away?

“The Hypnotist Suggests the Word Home”

^{Labyrinth, rapture, salvo. The release, all at once, a rack of rockets, a salve. Dismantling}

^{the elk nest,}

From the time we are young, we ask questions about the stories we are told. We want to know, sometimes even demand to know: Is this a true story? What really happened? And if presented with the ambiguous “based on a true story” explanation, we might find ourselves asking: Then which parts of it were real? But are these earnest questions foundational to the way we conceptualize stories, or is this impulse a pesky side effect of the way we are taught to think and categorize narratives?

Lassitude

It is from these long days of indescribable sickness

Where we would like to sleep the heavy sleep of the dead;

From these hours of anguish where existence weighs

On the soul and on the body.

So we search in vain for a gentle thought,

A joyful image, a rich memory;

The soul fights for an instant, and finally falls again, drooping

Under its deep troubles.

So all that enchants and all that we enjoy

Has for our open eyes only deceptive brightness;

And the dreamed happiness, if it comes, cannot exactly

Overpower our fatigue.

In this interview, Online Nonfiction Editor Vera Carothers spoke to Carmen Maria Machado about her new memoir, In the Dream House. The book explores domestic abuse in a lesbian relationship. Carmen is also the author of Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. She lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

In your third month we buy a manger at Babies R’ Us.

“Some Assembly Required,” you read on the box.

“That could be stamped on the side of you too,” I say. We both laugh. The college kid dollying the box smiles like he’s indulging his parents.

Elton John’s “Your Song” plays above on the store speakers. “That’s your song,” I say.

Last month, the Booker Prize committee raised literary eyebrows when they awarded the coveted international prize to two authors for the first time since 1992, when they made a rule never to do so again. I suppose rules are meant to be broken. You would certainly believe this if you were one of the two winners—Margaret Atwood with her highly anticipated The Handmaid’s Tale’s sequel The Testaments; and Bernardine Evaristo, who saw her lifetime sales double after the recognition of a novel about womxn, her eighth, Girl, Woman, Other. Its publication may mark the first time many Americans are reading the Anglo-Nigerian author.

Jaquira Diaz’s debut memoir Ordinary Girls is an intimate portrait of her life, from her beginnings in El Caserio, a government housing project of Puerto Rico, to her family’s migration to the streets of Miami. In four distinct sections, she provides visceral accounts of personal battles with identity, depression, and violence. But as much as the memoir is about Diaz, it is equally a story about her family—a schizophrenic mother, a drug dealer father, and a racist grandmother, who, Diaz writes, “was the first person to ever call me a nigger”—and an island marred by the legacy of colonialism. Moving swiftly from essay to essay, section to section, the stories that constitute Diaz’s real life read with the pulse of short fiction—each word, sentence, and scene is vital and vibrant, meticulous in its structure and devastating in its poignancy.