The current folio includes an excerpt from Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s novel-in-progress, The Nothing on Which the Fire Depends, my conversation with the author, and the following five essays on her works:

• The Language of Discontent, by Lisa Gulesserian
• Rapture, a Bull-Hook, a Puzzle, by Rikki Ducornet
• “All War Is Deception as Is All History”: Structure and Time in The Daydreaming Boy, by Jeffery Renard Allen
• Draining the Sea and the Simulation of Trauma, by J. S. DeYoung
• What You See Is What You Don’t Know: Thoughts upon Entering and Exiting The Brick House, by John Madera

For those of us who read and reread, teach and translate Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s works, these texts are the most radical, most critical, and most caring contributions that could have been made. I certainly hope they will forge new insights into Marcom’s brilliant novels and inspire further readings, analyses, and discussions.

—Shushan Avagyan, Guest Editor

Works by Micheline Aharonian Marcom

Three Apples Fell From Heaven. New York: Riverhead, 2001.
The Daydreaming Boy. New York: Riverhead, 2004.
Draining the Sea. New York: Riverhead, 2008.
The Mirror in the Well. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008.
A Brief History of Yes. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2013.
The Brick House. Austin: Awst Press, 2017.

Other Works about Micheline Aharonian Marcom

Tatiana Ryckman, “Thoughts on (not)Editing.” EVN Report (May 5, 2018).

Lisa Ann Gulesserian, “Because if the dead cannot live, neither do we”: Postmemory and Passionate Remembering in Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s Armenian Genocide Trilogy” (PhD Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, December 2015).

Music & Literature Magazine, Issue 1/Fall 2012, Section 3: Micheline Aharonian Marcom (Contributors: Shushan Avagyan, Taylor Davis-Van Atta, Tatiana Ryckman).

Rebecca Saunders and Shushan Avagyan, “(Un)Disciplining Traumatic Memory: Mission Orphanages and the Afterlife of Genocide in Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s The Daydreaming Boy.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 4.3 (2010), 197-219.

Contributors

Micheline Aharonian Marcom is the author of seven novels, including a trilogy of books about the Armenian genocide and its aftermath in the 20th century. She has received fellowships and awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the US Artists’ Foundation. Her first novel, Three Apples Fell From Heaven, was a New York Times Notable Book and Runner-Up for the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction. Her second novel, The Daydreaming Boy, won the PEN/USA Award for Fiction. In 2008, Marcom taught in Beirut, Lebanon on a Fulbright Fellowship. Marcom splits her time between Northern California and Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

Shushan Avagyan teaches translation theory and practice at the American University of Armenia. She is the translator of Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot, Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar, A Hunt for Optimism, and The Hamburg Score, by Viktor Shklovsky; Art and Production, by Boris Arvatov; and I Want To Live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian.

Jeffery Renard Allen is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. Allen is the author of five books, most recently the novel Song of the Shank, which is loosely based on the life of Blind Tom, a nineteenth century African American piano virtuoso and composer who was the first African American to perform at The White House. It won the CLMP Firecracker Award, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was nominated for the Dublin Literary Prize. Allen is the author of two other works of fiction, the novel Rails Under My Back, which won The Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Fiction, and the short story collection Holding Pattern, which won The Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Allen has received other accolades for his work, including a grant in Innovative Literature from Creative Capital, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a Bellagio Residency. His second collection of stories, Fat Time, will be published in 2020.

J. S. DeYoung lives in Atlanta, Georgia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including New Orleans Review, Booth, Corium, The Los Angeles Review, Monkeybicycle, Music & Literature, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Best American Mystery Stories 2012. He is a former Senior Editor at Numéro Cinq Magazine.

The author of nine novels, three collections of short fiction, two books of essays and five books of poetry, Rikki Ducornet has received both a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award For Fiction. She has received the Bard College Arts and Letters award and, in 2008, an Academy Award in Literature. Her work is widely published abroad.

Lisa Gulesserian is a Lecturer of Armenian Language and Culture at the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations at Harvard University. She earned her PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin, where she wrote her dissertation titled “Because if the dead cannot live, neither do we”: Postmemory and Passionate Remembering in Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s Armenian Genocide Trilogy.

John Madera has published work in Conjunctions, Bookforum, American Book Review, The Believer, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he edits Big Other and work as a freelance book publicist.