Siobhan Fallon’s debut story collection You Know When the Men Are Gone lets readers into a secret world of military families. Behind perfectly manicured lawns and Family Readiness Groups, Fallon’s stories reveal the stress of repeated deployment, wounded service members, and the difficulties of homecoming. Beth Garland, herself a military spouse, reviews a collection infused with “grief, heroism, and bitter disappointment.”
In Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories, Edith Pearlman grabs the reader’s attention and never lets it go. In this review, Andrea Nolan looks at some of Pearlman’s first lines and examines how her stories are united through character, theme, and place.
A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism is not your grandfather’s expat novel. In this smart debut, Peter Mountford rolls up his sleeves and delivers a crash course in Latin American history, contemporary economics, and international politics—all within a page-turning story about the dreams and gaffes of a twenty-something American working for an unscrupulous hedge fund in Bolivia.
In this lively conversation, Travis Holland and author Richard Ford discuss the genesis of Ford’s most famous fictional character, Frank Bascombe, the importance of always remembering the reader, greeting cards, what could well be one of the greatest short stories of the 20th century, and why place in fiction means nothing.
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.
In this review of Antonya Nelson’s fourth novel, Bound, Jackie Retizes examines the role of serial killers as literary signifiers, how Nelson navigates multiple points of view, and why the author succeeds (when many less expert writers don’t) in favoring ambiguity over conclusions, “offering delicate moments of attachment in a book that is less about permanence than it is about restoration.”
In 1990, Stephanie Vaughn published her debut collection of short fiction, Sweet Talk. Critical reception was overwhelmingly positive. A reviewer for Mother Jones Magazine wrote, “There is not a weak story in Sweet Talk and few are less than spectacular … Hers is a wise, touching, extraordinary voice—the sort rarely achieved at the end of a gifted career, let alone at the beginning.” To date, Vaughn’s first book has also been the only one her adoring fans have seen.
Philipp Meyer sets his debut novel, American Rust, within a landscape of retired warehouses, rattling railways, prisons and Wal-Mart. The crumbling underpinnings of American industry provide the backdrop for human catastrophe. Meyer made The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40″ list on the strength of a book in which Hanna Pylväinen finds echoes of Mark Twain, Frank O’Hara and Cormac McCarthy.
Debut novelist Urban Waite enjoys a character-driven thriller, which is exactly what he delivers with The Terror of Living. In conversation with Cam Terwilliger, Waite reveals how the selfish characters of Graham Greene shaped his idea of the perfect book, how an editor who understands the writer’s vision can only help a book, and how flexibility can be the novelist’s best friend.
When The Unthinkable happens, how does a person – let alone a writer – deal with it? Billy Lombardo answers that sticky question with How to Hold a Woman, a novel-in-stories about a family dealing with the loss of their eldest child, Isabel. In this review, Alison Espach explores how “the stories become not solely about the pain the family experiences, but more about when and how they feel happiness in light of the tragedy.”
