Do early heroes stand the test of time? Hemingway may be a young writer’s writer … who still keeps you late at the bar.

Novelist Megan Abbott talks to William Boyle about David Lynch, girls’ locker rooms, haunting cheerleading message boards, and losing your sense of wonder forever.

Ray Bradbury’s Pulitzer-winning stories provide a portal back to childhood, and the ultimate SciFi shape-shifter: age.

A close encounter with a famous novelist in his twilight alters the course of a writer’s life.

Jim Krusoe’s twelfth book, the novel Parsifal, launches into Unreal territory. The author on Kafka, dreams, playing the lotto, and why he’s given up motorcycles.

For me, the beauty of Janet (besides her flowing hair and karaoke skills, obviously) is that she forces students to name things, to make the abstract concrete. She won’t tolerate imprecise language, lazy writing, limp sentences.  I think her “Janet-isms” are in keeping with that. A lot of her funny sayings, some of them her [...]

mmersed in a 9-to-5, year-round office job since early 2007, I haven’t led a fiction workshop for some time. But if I should inhabit that particular teaching role again, I’d want to remind myself how the job is best done. Ideally, I’d do that by sitting in on one of Sands Hall’s workshops.
I met Sands [...]

Before submitting stories to workshop in graduate school, I spent hours combing my sentences for inefficiencies. I scrutinized verbs. I wrenched clauses from passive construction. I asked myself some hard questions about adjectives. My classmates often called my writing “clean,” which pleased me. I aspired toward concision.
One term workshop was led by an intimidating man [...]

Over the past six decades, Iraqi writer Mahmoud Saeed has used his novels, stories, and nonfiction to deconstruct the political and social turmoil of his beloved homeland. In a wide-ranging conversation with Stephen Morison, Jr., Saeed describes the difficulties Arab authors face in getting published, the institutionalized barriers to freedom of expression, and his constant attempt, through fiction, to “solve the puzzle of man and his actions.”

Myla Goldberg, author of Bee Season and lead singer of The Walking Hellos, discusses her voracious reading as a child, her new novel The False Friend, the trickiness of memory, love of a good trashy novel, and much more with Casey Tolfree.