Aaron J. Cance was born and raised in Wisconsin. He holds a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire and an M.A. in British and American Literature from the University of Utah. He lives in Salt Lake City with his wife, Katherine, and daughter, Viola Wren, where he teaches Composition and Advanced Composition as an adjunct and works full time at The King’s English Bookshop. Still searching for a publisher for his first novel, Walking the Dark Waters, he’s currently working on a second. Two poems from his latest chapbook, The Grassland Triptych, recently appeared in Southern Minnesota State University’s Bare Root Review. Among his favorite works are The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe, andInvisible Man by Ralph Ellison.
The British are Coming: Quercus Books arrives on US shores, debuting with Pierre Lemaitre’s Alex, a gripping and extremely intelligent thriller that will fully engage, mercilessly shock, and unexpectedly surprise its readers from its first page to its last.
The British are Coming: Quercus Books arrives on US shores, debuting with Pierre Lemaitre’s Alex, a gripping and extremely intelligent thriller that will fully engage, mercilessly shock, and unexpectedly surprise its readers from its first page to its last.
Aaron Cance talks with Josh Hanagarne about reading, writing, weightlifting, and living with Tourette’s.
Landscape and character connect and crackle in Peter Geye’s second novel, which investigates the wildness both in nature and within ourselves.
Musical, prayerful, mindful, compassionate—FWR’s Aaron Cance talks with Melanie Rae Thon (The Voice of the River) about what these qualities mean in fiction and in life.
“Thunderstruck,” Aaron Cance describes his reading of Bruce Machart’s two debut books: a novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, and a story collection, Men in the Making, out this week. They also discuss the themes of faith, masculinity, and love, and how a New England basement is a helpful metaphor for writing.
Aaron Cance interviews Jonathan Evison about his new novel, West of Here, a rich and complex self-examination, a study of the struggle between the human need to move forward and the historical inertia that is the result of our congested lifestyles. Its flawed, yet sympathetic cast of characters is compelling, as are the philosophical questions it poses. Although it will assuredly take its rightful place in the canon of American Western fiction, readers would do well to think of this work as something more than just another novel.
In Icelandic author Bragi Ólafsson’s The Pets, the narrator spends the novel hiding under his bed as his “friends,” who assume he isn’t home, gather in his apartment. Aaron Cance reviews this voyeuristic tale, its quirky narrative, and its debt to Moby Dick.
“We create things that we hope will, someday, become objects of value. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, many writers–Foer, DeLillo, and Roth, to name just a few–all came out with 9/11 novels. I was initially bothered by this. I wanted to say, ‘Fuck you; I was there.’ This passed for a couple reasons. First was the realization that we’re all survivors of one type or another. Second, these texts can never really become authoritative positions on the experiences of a group of people, no matter how well written they are or how well credentialed their creators might be. There’s no uniform experience of being a 9/11 survivor, no uniform experience of being a woman. These are things that can’t be owned by anyone.”
