Strange objects in fiction allow our inward fascinations to manifest on the page....
Strange objects in fiction act as powerful magnets for the reader.
“In a sense, the 21st century of Demolition Night is an outdated future, since its political satire was conceived before late 2016. These days, everything before that year’s November feels like ancient history. In the Trump era, satire has become increasingly difficult, if not impossible.”
“Here, in the end, we realize the extent of the narrator’s dark obsession.” In part II of her essay on strange objects in fiction, Elizabeth Mayer offers a close reading of Yoko Ogawa’s “Sewing for the Heart.”
“She is in love with the deer foot lamp—so be it!” In the first installment of this two-part essay on strange objects in fiction, Elizabeth Mayer goes in-depth with Joy Williams’s “Congress.”
“One of the things I also wanted to happen over the course of the collection was to unsettle people enough that even when they were reading realism, they didn’t know that they were reading realism”: Kristen Roupenian talks with Michelle Cheever about genre, empathy, and more.
“I imagine this book was a place he came to, a place where he came to express his writerly joy over the absurdity of life, especially life in the rural south, and also to ponder his particular questions about the balance between good and evil, and the culpability of the good”: Nathan Poole on William Gay’s posthumous novel.
On our delayed discovery of Lucia Berlin and what we miss when we miss independent presses.
“I think all honest, literary effort reflects the fact that we humans are imprisoned by our cultures. It isn’t so much getting the internal conflict onto the page, it is letting it come out.”
“Between those lines I sketched a person. I hope I did her justice.” Carrie Callaghan talks with Kate Lemery about bringing seventeenth-century painter Judith Leyster to life for her debut novel, A Light of Her Own, out now from Amberjack.
“Imagine two thousand people reading your interactive novel and each having completely unique story experiences. To me it sounded like the future—and I, as a writer who believes in exploring new storytelling tools, wanted a piece of it.” Returning to his “Quotes & Notes” series, Steven Wingate explores the pleasures and pitfalls of writing interactive fiction.
“Reading The Dakota Winters entertains—like visiting a museum of ephemera, or skimming through decades-old back issues of People Magazine“: Ellen Prentiss Campbell on Tom Barbash’s new novel.
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
Stories We Love: "Incarnations of Burned Children"
