The flight attendant on the cover of 207 does not deceive you: this issue is a ride and a half. For your reading enjoyment we offer:

Geoff Dyer on the art of nonfiction—and why he hates that rubric:

I don’t think a reasonable assessment of what I’ve been up to in the last however many years is possible if one accepts segregation. That refusal is part of what the books are about.I think of all them as, um, what’s the word? … Ah, yes, books! I haven’t subjected it to scientific analysis, but if you look at the proportion of made-up stuff in the so-called novels versus the proportion of made-up stuff in the others I would expect they’re pretty much the same

Edward P. Jones on the art of fiction:

People say, Did you grow up thinking of yourself as this or that, blah blah blah. These middle-class or upper-class kids, maybe three or four times a week they’d have a doctor over, they’d have an engineer over, they’d have a writer over, and they’d get into a conversation with the writer and all of a sudden realize, Oh, I think I want to be a writer. That didn’t happen to me. That doesn’t happen to the rest of us.

Plus! The first installment of a novel by Rachel Cusk. New fiction from J. D. Daniels, Jenny Offill, Nell Freudenberger, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Lydia Davis, and the winner of the NPR Three-Minute Fiction Contest.

Plus, poems by Kevin Prufer, Susan Stewart, Hilda Hilst, Charlie Smith, Monica Youn, Sylvie Baumgartel, Emily Moore, and Linda Pastan.

And did we mention a portfolio of nudes by Chuck Close?

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