Rebecca Scherm on using charts while working on her debut novel, Unbecoming: “It helps me remember how messy this process was, how difficult. I need to see the record of that mess to believe that I can do this again.”
“Be careful what you invent, darling”: Mary Kay Zuravleff talks to Melissa Scholes Young about her latest novel, Man Alive!
In her review of Marilynne Robinson’s newest novel, Lila, Ellen Prentiss Campbell writes of the author’s work, “all four of Robinson’s novels—Housekeeping as well as the Gilead trilogy—are united by her compassionate attention to the possibility for amazing, transcendent grace breaking through and illuminating flawed human existence and our daily experience.”
Diane Cook talks with Anne Valente about her short story collection By Light We Know Our Names: “In fiction, I think objects and patterns among those objects serve as something tangible for me and for characters, a way of making meaning out of something concrete in the face of uncertainty, intangibility, and everything we can’t and don’t know.”
John Vanderslice talks to Garry Craig Powell about his collection Island Fog: “. . . whenever I’m there I’m always struck by how different Nantucket seems. I’m always telling people it’s like visiting an alternative United States.”
In her review of All My Puny Sorrows, Eleanor J. Bader calls this new novel by Miriam Toews “a love story writ large.” She goes on to say, “It also serves as a potent rebuttal to one of Western culture’s most cherished delusions—that if we have love, nothing else matters.”
