Mousse #90 – The Fiction Issue

Dear readers,
 
Why fiction? Because “the problematic implies a terrain to be shared under the aegis of perplexity,” as philosopher Isabelle Stengers points out in her 2023 book Making Sense in Common—a title it would be tempting to steal for this occasion. And because stories help us “to make sense of the world and to act in it,” writes Christina Sharpe in Ordinary Notes (2023).
 
When we claim that fiction is, quite literally, fiction, we might be wide of the mark. Working with an inventory of emotions, fiction weaves through the heart’s geographies: storms of the century, crying stars, hummable moods that wash over us, highs so high or lows so low we renegotiate cans and cannots. Fiction itches us to get away, while its stoking fire lures us to stay a little longer. Is it about practicing character development? Playing our own shrink? Adding a spring to our step? Articulating the impossible, in times of adversity? In the name of whatever it is, fiction has a distinctive way to kiss and tell.
 
Bringing together a cohort of writers and artists, Mousse #90 stems from the eponymous Fiction column that has dwelled in our pages for five years, and expands its scope. It was developed together with Rosanna McLaughlin, Skye Arundhati Thomas, and Izabella Scott, whose collective coedited the art and literature quarterly The White Review between 2021 and 2023. We think it’s important to reinstate how collaborations across platforms are crucial to the cultural ecosystem, especially at a time when independent publications are increasingly at risk of closure.
 
Here you’ll find reprints from both magazines as well as new stories and translations we have jointly commissioned. Seven interludes, intended to open up other worlds through images, feature drawings by Atelier dell’Errore, Michael E. Smith, Camille Henrot, Michael Landy, Simone Forti, Adelaide Cioni, and Evelyn Taocheng Wang.
 
The prose presented in this issue goes by many names—“fiction, autofiction, theoretical fiction, ficto-criticism, meta-criticism,” as Travis Jeppesen quipped about the “poetics of indeterminacy”¹—and resists unequivocal definitions. It lingers at the corners, where the boundaries between art and writing can dissolve. It bends, and so do we while reading it. It makes us small, like the protagonist of Eileen Myles’s “Tiny.” It makes us big, much like the woman portrayed in “Ghost Story” by Pip Adam. It drives us to “Run for Our Lives” via Dodie Bellamy’s bereavement. It makes us feel seen when we don’t want to be, as Elvia Wilk writes in “Extinction Burst” of the doctors trying to “explain me to me.” It pushes us to defy who gets to be seen, “the law of ownership, the law of who owns who, which is to say, what owns what,” as Johanna Hedva calls for in “Your Love Is Not Good.”
 
What does it mean when we say that fiction has more than meets the eye? It might suggest that we must “try in jolts, so awkward, to take heart.”
 
Mousse