How does one teach those phenomenal, force-of-nature fiction writing students who walk into a classroom with their own identities? With the expectation that the teacher will change, too, writes Steven Wingate in his latest Quotes and Notes column.

This week’s feature is A Kite in the Wind, edited by Andrea Barrett and Peter Turchi. Published this spring by Trinity University Press, the book is the most recent title in a series of craft books that are drawn predominately from lecturers given as a part of the Warren Wilson MFA program. Previous collections include [...]

In the midst of a stellar authorial career and after a quarter century of teaching creative writing, Bret Lott takes a moment to talk about sending students in the right direction, maintaining a sincere workshop practice, and keeping your writing (and reading) life alive as you teach.

Known for stories and novels that force us to question the conventional dichotomy between realist and fantasy fiction, Kevin Brockmeier knows how to reveal the strangeness of the world around us. In conversation with Mary Stewart Atwell, Brockmeier discusses his new novel, The Illumination, and the compelling metaphors that inform his writing.

This week’s feature is Donald Lystra’s debut novel Season of Water and Ice. Lystra, a retired engineer, lives in Ann Arbor and spends part of each summer in northern Michigan, on the Leelanau Peninsula, where this book is set. His short fiction has appeared in many literary journals, including Other Voices, The North American Review, [...]

When The Clash asked the question “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” Jennine Capó Crucet had an answer. In How to Leave Hialeah, Crucet’s debut short story collection, characters wrestle with how the places they’re from shape their identity, how to grow beyond them, and why leaving is sometimes the only answer. In this interview, Melissa Scholes Young and Jennine Capó Crucet discuss the influence of setting and place in fiction, the intoxicating pull of hometowns, and the realities of the American Dream.

This week’s feature is Simon Van Booy’s Everything Beautiful Began After. Published earlier this month by Harper Perrenial, the book is Van Booy’s first novel. He is also the author of two story collections, The Secret Lives of People in Love and Love Begins in Winter, which won the 2009 Frank O’Connor International Short Story [...]

Award-winning short story author and bon vivant Simon Van Booy releases his first novel, Everything Beautiful Began After, and proves that his crystalline, poetic prose, showcased in essays and short stories up to now, is also compelling in long-form fiction.

In her first novel, Swamplandia! (Knopf, 2011), acclaimed short story writer Karen Russell (St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves) renders a highly specific shoebox-world of wonder and mystery. Set in the Florida swamps, largely within a fictional alligator theme park, the sun rises and sets with her lush yet economical descriptions and poignant characterizations of the 14-year-old protagonist, Ava, and her rapidly dissolving family.

Preeta Samarasan finds South African novelist Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat to be transformative. The story of an Afrikaner woman and the black servant who has worked for her for most of both their lives, Agaat examines relationships of race and power between the two women by employing a stunning combination of structural intricacy, stylistic range, and daring allegory.