Inside Our November/December 2024 Issue
Of Art & Consequences
At Foreword, we love a good dystopian novel. See Kree and The Way in our literary fiction feature for evidence: in them, survivors fight through “fetid” worlds, finding and enacting mercy where they can and clinging to love, community, and other intangible beauties after material comforts have faded away. Reviewer Eileen Gonzalez noted the “Pyrrhic satisfaction” in such tales.
These are stories we relish—but whose pages we don’t want to live in. We acknowledge, and strive to avoid, the horrific potentialities they reveal; they are antipodal to the futures we dream of. If we are to inhabit stories ourselves, we want them to offer at least the hope of a happy ending—to embody joy, rather than discord.
When this issue reaches you, we’ll be breaths away from a consequential election with dark echoes of the recent past. We’ll be readying ourselves to choose what kind of future we’d like to live in—to write the next chapter in our collective story, knowing that none of us can turn the page alone.
I believe that readers are uniquely equipped to navigate such choices, such sharp divergences in the road. Art, after all, is inherently political. It celebrates the best that we are capable of, exposes our vices, warns us of potential missteps, and imagines better worlds. It indicts and invents. Sitting with art and absorbing its lessons, we learn to be discerning, following promises of progress and threats of regression through to their logical conclusions.
At this almost-there point, we invite you into these 100+ visions of the world as it is and could be with anxious appreciation. Each title in this issue has something to teach us about who we are and could become. And until the choice is made: we hope.
Sincerely,
Michelle Anne Schingler
Editor in Chief
mschingler@forewordreviews.com
Did you know we pick out the most compelling books from every issue of Foreword Reviews for a series of reviewer-author interviews? That’s right, every Thursday, our digital newsletter Foreword This Week spotlights our top reviewers pitching a set of provocative questions to the authors of the books they admire. Sign up here and join the thousands of readers who relish these entertaining conversations between literary hotshots.
Here’s a list of the books we’re reviewing in our September/October issue.
Michelle Anne Schingler
