Jeremiah Chamberlin

Each of us has our own secret symbols, a private reliquary where memory and meaning reign. A battered cast iron skillet. An heirloom quilt. The scent of wet red clay that evokes a childhood in the Piedmont. Fiction provides a window into the inner sanctum of a stranger. Proust’s madeleine, Poirot’s mustache, Charles Kane’s Rosebud. In Tamas Dobozy’s story “The Restoration of the Villa Where Tibor Kálmán Once Lived” (originally published in One Story), the vessel of all meaning is a house.

Editor’s Note: For the first several months of 2022, we’ll be celebrating some of our favorite work from the last fourteen years in a series of “From the Archives” posts. In today’s feature, Melissa Scholes Young talks with Jacinda Townsend about her debut novel, Saint Monkey. Townsend’s new novel, Mother Country, is out with Graywolf next week. This interview was originally published on March 3, 2014.