Limitless: An Interview with Jane Smiley
“I would be sitting there typing, typing, typing and saying, ‘Die, die, die'”: Jane Smiley talks with Mary Camille Beckman about practice novels, Dickens, and her forthcoming trilogy.
“I would be sitting there typing, typing, typing and saying, ‘Die, die, die'”: Jane Smiley talks with Mary Camille Beckman about practice novels, Dickens, and her forthcoming trilogy.
In her latest collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Knopf), Russell traffics in her now-trademark wit. In eight tightly drawn stories, she imagines fantastical worlds that stem from the bleakest realities.
“Nostalgia, of course, is the most powerful form of lust: portable as your memories, infinitely rechargeable, and impossible to slake.” Dan Keane reviews James Salter’s new novel, All That Is.
Our new feature is Alix Ohlin‘s most recent collection, Signs and Wonders (Vintage), which was simultaneously published last month with her new novel, Inside (Knopf). Additionally, she is the author of the novel The Missing Person (Knopf, 2005) and the collection Babylon and Other Stories (Knopf, 2006). Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Best New American Voices, and has also appeared on public radio’s Selected Shorts. Born and raised in Montreal, she currently lives in Easton, Pennsylvania, and teaches at Lafayette College. She is also on the faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for […]
For the last two weeks we’ve been featuring Tania James’s new story collection Aerogrammes, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Tiffany Alexander (@alexandervision) Stacey Joy Netzel (@StaceyJoyNetzel) Kay Glass (@kglass112406) Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address: winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us! Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books out there!
Our new feature is Tania James‘s collection Aerogrammes and Other Stories (Knopf). James is also the author of Atlas of Unknowns (Knopf, 2009), which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, an Indie Next Notable, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and a Best Book of 2009 for The San Francisco Chronicle and NPR. Her short fiction has appeared in such places as Boston Review, Granta, Guernica, Kenyon Review, One Story, Orion, and A Public Space. The title story of her collection was a finalist for Best American Short Stories 2008 and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She […]
A finalist for the National Book Award, Julie Otsuka’s innovative novel The Buddha in the Attic pushes the bounds of narrative form with a collective narrator and a resistance to fixed fates. By inviting the reader to consider what could have happened, instead of what did, Otsuka makes her complicit in the fate of the story’s mail-order-brides.
In The Cat’s Table, Ondaatje returns to Sri Lanka as the story follows three boys who, along with a cast of eccentrics, make their way from Colombo to England. By turns adventurous, mysterious, and wistful, the novel traces the search for belonging amidst strangers and strange lands. Charlotte Boulay considers Ondaatje’s latest beautiful offering in the context of his larger body of work.
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.
In a generation of “Pointers,” the relationship between and among songs on an album—its narrative—is all but lost in favor of hit single after single. But in Jennifer Egan’s new book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, an array of stories mix into a cohesive novel, each chapter self-contained yet fluid as the grooves of an LP.
