Editors’ Note
Isuse 31: Fiction
AUGUST 5, 2025
There's a famous essay from 1960 by Philip Roth about the difficulty of writing fiction at a time of overwhelming news. “The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist,” he writes. What hope is there for the novelist, and the novel’s readers? Should novelists write satire? Hew closely to the topics of the present, or eschew reality altogether?
We are not a magazine of young Philip Roths. Far from it. But this kind of conversation came up regularly when putting together this year's fiction issue. The news that we all face is distressing, overwhelming, at times flattening. What place is there for fiction when reality demands our constant attention?
The writers we have chosen give possible answers. Many of the stories in this issue take on the most visceral and direct aspects of the self — those that can’t be extinguished by any political event: love, caregiving, sex. In “The Melody,” Salomat Vafo describes a caretaker who has lost the old woman in her care; in “Hernando,” the narrator lusts after a young man working at her shop. Two works of science fiction, “Illegal Alien” and “The Cells” imagine other worlds from which to see this one. And in “Lift Up Your Hearts,” the Polish author Grzegorz Bogdał gives us a fable whose aggressive bleakness is almost exhilarating. (These stories are translated by Sabrina Jaszi, Kit Maude and Dawid Mobolaji.)
The stories, in their variety and style, offer a different vision for fiction, one that does not respond to the world so much as create its own images of it. For, if as we see every day, the world tosses up events beyond our wildest imagination, we still have some control over our own minds and thoughts. And in a very noisy world, there’s still power in the last word.
Finally, a note of a more practical nature. This fiction issue is the last that The Dial is producing with a distinct theme. Starting in September, we'll be publishing stories under a different format, which we hope will allow us to be more attentive to you, our readers, and more flexible in responding to the news. We look forward to sharing it with you.
— The Editors
✺ Published in “Issue 31: Fiction” of The Dial
