Close Observations on a Long Journey: An Interview with Melanie Finn
by Benjamin Woodard
Melanie Finn sits down to talk with Benjamin Woodard about her latest novel, The Hare, out now from Two Dollar Radio.
You’ve done your job if you’ve created characters that feel so authentic that...
I try to see the characters in their wholeness, to understand (but not excuse) their...
Melanie Finn sits down to talk with Benjamin Woodard about her latest novel, The Hare, out now from Two Dollar Radio.
“I wanted to infuse the book with a sense of hauntedness, and I realized that one way to do that was to let the victims who are at the center of the novel act as a Greek chorus.” Caitlin Mullen talks with Daisy Alpert Florin about her debut novel, Please See Us, which is currently a 2021 Edgar Allen Poe Award finalist for Best First Novel.
“The rubble of what happens is the real souvenir in these stories: memento mori, reminder not just of time gone by, but of death, always there, always approaching.” Ellen Prentiss Campbell on Elizabeth McCracken’s new collection, The Souvenir Museum.
J.T. Bushnell on how Michael Deagler’s “New Poets” makes us rethink an old trope: the antagonist.
Katey Schultz and Patricia Ann McNair talk bad characters, breaking rules, and McNair’s latest collection, Responsible Adults.
“His narrator’s point of view evolves with the story, revealing this evolution through how he sees his setting”: Kent Kosack on Tobias Wolff’s subtle gem “Powder.”
“One of the things that was really important to me was to find a structure that was different in order to talk about nature, to talk about climate change.” Alexander Tilney asks Madeleine Watts about writing climate change and her debut novel, The Inland Sea.
“If the book strides beyond the noir conventions, as you suggest and certainly I hope, it does so especially to please a couple of ideal readers I had in mind as I wrote it, readers who loved language as much as they ever loved anything….” Charles Lamar Phillips talks with James Whorton, Jr. about his novel Estranged.
Robert L. Shuster examines works of fiction that purport to be real accounts, analyzing how authenticating elements influence our engagement with stories, as well as how these techniques shaped his own debut novel, To Zenzi.
“There are those who think comic novels are not serious novels. Tell that to Chaucer, Dickens, Heller, Vonnegut, among others. Tell it to Shakespeare! Humor is just a different way to tell a story.” John Blumenthal talks with Nina Buckless about his new comic novel, The Strange Courtship of Abigail Bird.
