Joy Deng’s poignant and vivid narrative about love, loss, and memory explores the symbolism of flowers, particularly the rosy dipelta and peonies, as the protagonist grapples with the echoes of a past relationship. With themes of grief, nostalgia, and the passage of time, the tale is a meditation on how small moments and details can carry profound emotional weight.

Still feeling out of place at her university, English major Joy meets Nan, the intriguing but divisive girlfriend of her classmate Matt. While Joy's roommate Blair sees through Nan's "liquid gold" persona, Joy remains curious.

Zhou Hau Liew’s “Quarantine Hotel” is a lyrical ekphrasis, as if a quarantine hotel were an installation art piece that places participants after the whip and before the lash of a sudden global pandemic, triggering ethereal eidetic imagery across space and time.

Sonja Srinivasan’s vivid telling of a senator’s wife taking the train out of D.C, a city founded on freedom, raised on decorum, and bolstered by propriety, for New York.

Award-winning translator Nicky Harman introduces Chinese modernist woman writer Ling Shuhua (1900-1990) and her story “Writing a letter.” Active in literary and artistic circles of the 1920s and 1930s, Ling Shuhua was unique in having close connections with the Bloomsbury group; she was friends with Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Vita Sackville-West.