The fiction section of the new issue (ETA: the set of stories that indicate they’ve been guest edited by Claire Messud) of Guernica is guest-edited by Claire Messud and she offers a brief essay, Writers, Plain and Simple, to introduce her selections, all written by women. In her essay, Messud writes of how Elizabeth Bishop did not wish to be known as a woman writer and she states:

As an American writer of the early twenty-first century, I agree with her wholeheartedly. An artist’s work is in no way limited or defined by her gender. To allot space, then—such as this fiction section of Guernica—to women writers specifically is, surely, to limit and define them—us!—by an irrelevant fact of birth.

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