EDITOR’S NOTE

Looking Past the Past

If you could change the past, would you? This question is posed at the end of our review of Keeping Time, a fantasy novel in which an archaeologist travels through time, hoping to repair a relationship that is flailing in the present. But he discovers—as we all do when we meditate long on what-ifs and might-have-beens—that acting on hindsight results in its own paradoxes. If we’d known then what we do now, we would not be us.

When confronting the inexorable past, the bravest readers and writers refuse sanitized illusions, despite the appeal of rejecting yesterday’s barbs and pains. We are more prone to probe the past for meaning, knowing that every moment has a moral, and every egregious mishap or mistake suggests its own future antidotes. We muse, experiment, wonder, test, and learn; it’s a wiser tomorrow that we’re seeking, not a perfected past.

Look no further than the titles in this issue for proof that we’ll never stop excavating yesterday’s truths, piece by piece, and using them to move toward something better. This is evident in novels like The Aowasa Murders, whose investigators know that there’s more to sealed cases than a “Closed” stamp will acknowledge; and in

Six Inches Deeper, a true crime account in which chance itself is the catalyst for long-withheld revelations.

Tin House’s The Last Summer of Ada Bloom shows how the unaddressed past can poison families; the history titles Possess the Air and Today Sardines Are Not For Sale both suggest that it’s resistance to the norm, not acquiescence to it, that helps to settle troubled communities.

Today itself isn’t perfect. It’s seductive to entertain the possibility of a tweak—the utterance of unspoken words, votes differently cast, or rejected chances taken—but we know that our troubles won’t be fixed that way. So we push forward page by page, absorbing lessons, and ultimately, working toward stories that are richer because of how we stumbled into them.