“I’m playing with the question of fate but also social mobility. How much do we become the people our family situation predicted we would?” Debra Jo Immergut talks with Sharon Harrigan about her debut novel, Half, writing in first-person plural, darkness in fiction, desire, and more.
“I’ve always had an urge to transcend, to go beyond”: Sharon Solwitz talks with Maggie Kast about her new book, Side by Side but Never Face to Face.
“The stories here show simultaneously how life is lived and what it feels like to be Black, rendered in ways that are honest and brutal.” Jessica Sullivan on “The Finkelstein 5” from Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s collection Friday Black.
“The tension between whether a story wants to be long or short requires us to examine them together.” Melissa Scholes Young thinks about form and story containers by engaging with the work of R.L. Maizes.
“Fiction writers—like gardeners skilled with pruning shears working on a young plant—can bring a tremendous sense of shape to their work by cutting off opportunities for potential even while the work itself is in its infancy.” Steven Wingate draws from Robert Olen Butler’s short-short fiction to advocate for constraint.
“Homes delivers exactly on her narrator’s opening promise”: Barrett Bowlin on A.M. Homes’s cult classic short story “A Real Doll.”
“The truth of the story somehow comforts”: Kent Kosack on Lauren Groff’s “Ghosts and Empties.”
“Wortman-Wunder’s stories never completely implicate or exculpate the protagonists”: Hasanthika Sirisena on Emily Wortman-Wunder’s debut collection, Not a Thing to Comfort You, winner of the Iowa Short Story Prize.
“Over its thirty tales, Why, Why, Why? further solidifies Monzó’s reputation as a master.” Benjamin Woodard reviews Quim Monzó’s latest collection in translation from Open Letter Books.
Josie Tolin on how George Saunders uses a sense of familial inevitability “to both subvert and amplify what might otherwise be a run-of-the-mill, bad-dad situation” in his story “Sticks.”
Surprising Things Can Happen: An Interview with Kristen Roupenian
Part of a Bigger Conversation: An Interview with Rebecca Makkai
If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi: An Interview with Neel Patel
Sometimes Taking Things Out Counts as Writing: an Interview with Celeste Ng
Influences: An Interview with Tobias Wolff
Stories We Love: “Blue Lenses,” by Daphne Du Maurier
Stories We Love: “White Angel,” by Michael Cunningham
Stories We Love: Donald Barthelme’s “The School,” In Which is Revealed the Meaning of Life
Stories We Love: "A Small, Good Thing" by Raymond Carver
Stories We Love: "The Fall River Axe Murders," by Angela Carter
