Inevitably the real self does come out. Maybe we put parts of ourselves that we actually don’t manifest in reality into fiction—it’s such an unconscious process.

It’s as easy as it sounds in my grandparents’ letters to live a normal life under an authoritarian regime. You love or fall out of love, you go on summer adventures, defend a dissertation. The trains keep running, cows keep giving milk.

Watching Chinese immigrants shouting curt orders to Black workers in their newly learned English was often like observing a failed game of telephone, as the workers’ faces bore quiet offense.

Members Only author Sameer Pandya talks with Yoojin Na about the ideal measure of novelistic time, India, layered moments in fiction, and the grace of tennis.

"I don't write for critics and reviewers, nor do I cater to a wider audience (by which one usually means a white audience). My work is always addressed to a very small audience: Sri Lankan readers reading in English."

Ilya Lyashevsky, whose short story At the Seaside is featured in Epiphany’s Fall/ Winter 2011-2012 issue, didn’t reach consciousness until he was twenty-five.

“What he didn’t understand was that the more heavenly our experience, the starker its contrast with my mind’s occupations, the wider the chasm would yawn between us, the more alienated I’d be. It was like the story of Moses, in which the water of the Egyptians was turned into blood. A curse had crippled me. Shown blue ocean, I saw crimson gore.”

“Up here he no longer needed to hide his voice.”

You don’t know what else to say, so you ask about simple things, like what her favorite commissary snacks are, and if you can send coloring books through the corrections postal service.