A First Look at Our Summer Issue

Our Summer Fiction Issue is coming soon—with new work by Rachel Cusk, Bryan Washington, and more. Plus: a writing prompt and seven first lines.

The Yale Review

and

Meghan O'Rourke

Jun 05, 2025

Where we hope you’ll be reading our summer issue. Photo by Chris Weiher on Unsplash

From the Editor’s Desk

I’ve always loved the “back matter” of a good book—the acknowledgments, the endnotes that reveal a quieter story beneath the surface. It’s where writers drop their guard, where the making becomes visible. As a lifelong reader and aspiring writer, I’ve always found something exciting in that glimpse into the back room where writing is made. Our new Substack, Back Matter, is meant to offer just that: a space behind the scenes at The Yale Review for readers and writers alike.

Our Summer Fiction Issue launches online next week, and it’s one of my favorite issues yet. Print subscribers are starting to receive their copies now, and we wanted to offer our Substack readers a first look at the issue. In it, you’ll find stories by Rachel Cusk, Bryan Washington, Sigrid Nunez, and more—each exploring how longing of one kind or another rearranges the shapes of our lives.

We’re experimenting here with something new: a writing prompt in each newsletter, drawn from the fiction, essays, and poems we publish. These aren’t “prompts” in the how-to sense, but small invitations—windows into thinking about form, voice, and process. Consider them short dispatches from our writing desks to yours.

The Summer Issue: What You’ll Find Inside

When I was a child, my mother took my brother and me, on the first day of summer vacation, to the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street—back when it was a cavernous, quiet place full of used textbooks, Greek columns, and hidden treasures. We each picked twenty books, packed them in a wooden wine crate, and took them with us on a monthlong canoe-camping trip through remote islands in Maine.

When I think of summer reading, I think of the kind of immersion I experienced as a child—lying in a sleeping bag with a flashlight and a crate full of novels on a quiet island, the air thick with pine, the lake dark beyond the tent flap. Fiction became a second landscape, laid like an interior weather over the long, quiet days.

We wanted this issue to re-create that kind of transport: an encounter with stories that immerse, unsettle, and reorient. Some highlights:

Rachel Cusk’s Into the Light, a mythic, near-biographical story of a woman artist, explores the tension between art and life.
Bryan Washington’s Crossings is a quietly devastating account of intimacy, dislocation, and ambivalence, set in Tokyo.
Scholastique Mukasonga brings her sharp wit and clarity to The Edge of the Lake, set in a Catholic girls’ school in Burundi.
Samanta Schweblin gives us Welcome to the Club, a fable of suicidal ideation that is eerie, spare, and unforgettable.
Sigrid Nunez, in The Rabbit’s Foot, reflects on class, memory, and survival through the story of a woman who once cleaned hotel rooms for the rich.
Jenny Erpenbeck’s Junk excavates the psychic residue of twentieth-century war through the clutter of a Berlin apartment.
Sarah Bernstein’s The Shanda traces shame and silence across generations in a quietly unsettling story.

First Lines: Seven Sparks for Summer Writing

“The artist B was married three times, two of them to the same man, though on the latter occasion his right leg was missing.” —Rachel Cusk

“First I spot him holding hands with his husband.” —Bryan Washington

“Who does a death belong to?” —Sarah Bernstein

“He was a duke, or an earl—he was some sort of nobility—and not the first of his kind to visit the hotel.” —Sigrid Nunez

“I jump into the water at the end of the dock and sink down, holding my nose.” —Samanta Schweblin

“It all started with our history and geography teacher.” —Scholastique Mukasonga

“Of course it’s nice when the eye can be at peace . . .” —Jenny Erpenbeck

What makes a good first line? Tell us your favorite—and why. Or try this week’s generative prompt below.

Prompt No. 1: On Ghosts, Geometry, and the Second Self

Inspired by Rachel Cusk’s “Into the Light”

Write a short essay, story, or hybrid text that explores the tension between public and private selves—between the life we live and the form we chase. You might begin with a place imbued with personal mythos (a riverbank, a gallery, a house once lived in), or with an object that stands in for something unspoken (a lost key, a painting, a bowl).

Consider the ghost that haunts your work or your home. Where is it located: in the room, in a parent, in the body? And what form would it take if you could make it visible?

What's Coming Next

In upcoming Back Matter posts, we’ll be sharing:

A reading list in honor of the late Edmund White, a longtime TYR contributor
Pieces from Garth Greenwell, Katie Kitamura, and a second writing prompt, drawn from Bryan Washington’s unforgettable story of reconnection in Tokyo
Summer reading picks from TYR editors
Notes from the editorial margins (what we loved, why we cut a paragraph, what we debated in a fiction meeting)
Introductions to some of our staff and contributors

Drop a comment and let us know what you think! We hope this space grows into something reciprocal—a two-way channel between the magazine and its readers.

Thanks for reading—and writing—with us.

Warmly,

Meghan O’Rourke
Editor of The Yale Review

A guest post by