The Inland Sea – Madeleine Watts
The Inland Sea demonstrates both what realist fiction can offer, as we try harder to grapple with climate crisis, and what it can’t.
“Write what you know,” rather than urging you to burnish the surface of the “personal,” demands that you admit how much knowledge of this society’s complexity and injustice — how much personal knowledge — you really do have.
Revenge of the Translator – Brice Matthieussent
You could also say that it was her most transgressive, subversive move to forego revenge, content instead to disappear.
One of these novellas is not like the other. The asymmetry, of course, is very much the point, and the contrast is inherently political. Together, the two parts ask, What ‘we’ can hold us?