From the Archives: “I can only write if I have stolen something valuable that day”: Shawn Andrew Mitchell asks Jesse Ball about lies, dreams, and his novel Silence Once Begun.
“In Slimani’s novel, the burden placed upon women to care for children balances alongside the treatment and perceptions of immigrant women. And rendering these issues to subtext, rather than treating them head-on and politically, the narrative forces the reader to become complicit in the shoddy treatment of others for the sake of convenience and creature comforts.”
From the Archives: “The narrator has spent most of her life in other people’s shadows, but through her storytelling asserts an identity that’s no longer tethered to another, one released only by disgrace.”
“The fun part of writing for me is the inspiration and initial outpouring; the painful part is spending five hours paring away 250 words. It’s like sticking pins in my eyes”: Kim Magowan answers Michelle Ross’s questions about her path to fiction, her writing process, and Undoing, her debut collection, out next week from Moon City Press.
“. . .these two groups of women are indeed sisters under the skin, and these authors are sisters as well”: Ellen Prentiss Campbell on connecting Nesbit and Otsuka through their use of first-person plural.
“Beard’s story explores a unique domestic backstory in the development of the atomic bomb as experienced by both witting and unwitting participants.”
From the Archives: Charles Johnson is the author of numerous books, including the National Book Award-winning Middle Passage. Zachary Watterson, one of Johnson’s former students, spoke with his mentor in 2010 about the literary friendships that have influenced the author’s more than forty-year writing career.
“Yarbrough asks, what does it take to care again? At rock bottom, what makes a person look forward and up?”: Mari Carlson on Steve Yarbrough’s new novel, The Unmade World, out now from Unbridled Books.
From the Archives: “Quatro’s stories are often fabulist, if fabulism is magical realism plus a reckoning.” Rebecca Scherm on Jamie Quatro’s debut collection, I Want to Show You More.
“It took me writing these stories to understand that I’d been carrying rage with me, and what I’d done to suppress it even as I didn’t believe in suppressing it”: Danielle Lazarin talks with Lee Thomas about her debut collection, Back Talk.
