Marburg does not glory in her characters’ flaws or paint simplistic grotesques...
Kalamujić takes readers on a journey of introspection, formulating an awareness...
“I think each of us speak multiple languages. Not necessarily whole different tongues like Russian and English, but we speak different glosses. I like to think of those as languages.” Ian Ross Singleton talks with Cameron Finch about his debut novel, Two Big Differences.
“Accurate identification of the fictional form is important to readers and authors. But it also makes life easier for book reviewers who walk a tightrope between several different constituencies—the author, the publisher, and the reading public.” Sharon Oard Warner on the pleasures and particulars of the novella.
“I read and I write to explore lives I haven’t lived. To encounter different lives, responses, experiences. Historical fiction can be something like the illumination of starlight, reaching us, seemingly alive and bright, years after.”
“No Diving Allowed defies the literary cult of likability.” Mary Volmer reviews Louise Marburg’s latest collection.
Costa B. Pappas reviews Lejla Kalamujić’s new novel, Call Me Esteban.
“Sometimes I read pronouncements on Twitter like, ‘Let’s face it, there’s no reason a book should ever be 500 pages long,’ and I always think, of course there should be 500-page books. And fifteen-page books. There should be every kind of book.” Jenny Shank talks with Paula Younger about her new collection.
“While I admire a good dystopia as much as the next politically disillusioned person, I think the future needs the power of our imaginations to generate hopeful alternatives.” Melissa Scholes Young talks with Joy Castro about her new novel, Flight Risk.
“Whether a novel is set in motion by a strange event, has an incredulous premise, or is riddled with bizarre scenes and interactions, they all demand a compelling response that aligns with the physics of the fictive world.” Andrew Felsher on how strangeness in fiction can illuminate and reveal.
Polly Stewart talks with Laura McHugh about her new book, What’s Done in Darkness, as part of Stewart’s “Women Crime Writers” series.
“Perhaps this is what is so successful about Those Fantastic Lives: the collection goes beyond familiar narratives of the supernatural by asking why we are afraid of monsters and ghosts, and the things we cannot explain…” Costa B. Pappas reviews Bradley Sides’s debut collection.
