Stories We Love: “The Rapture Index,” by Molly Reid
“What is the end of the world to us? Is it the end of a marriage? The end of our families as we know them? Is it the splintering of a relationship with a loved one? Or is it the literal Rapture?”
“What is the end of the world to us? Is it the end of a marriage? The end of our families as we know them? Is it the splintering of a relationship with a loved one? Or is it the literal Rapture?”
“I want you to connect and empathize with those people. I want you to understand that you are capable of horrible things even if you’re a good person.” Saul Lemerond interviews Leigh Camacho Rourks about Grit Lit, writing the body, unlikeable characters, and more.
“[My favorite] stories, by the way, were submitted to over 100 literary journals before they found homes. I really loved them, which I guess is why I kept plugging away at the revisions until they were accepted”: Julie Zuckerman talks with Jolene McIlwain about persistence, family lore, and the thrill of publishing her first collection of linked stories.
“Doubt is there for me, but I don’t see it as an engine in my life or in this novel. For me, the big engine is trying to align myself to the flow of a life that is spiritual in absolutely every aspect and moves in ways I can’t comprehend, but simply have to live”: Rolf Yngve interviews Steve Wingate about his new novel, Of Fathers and Fire, out from the University of Nebraska Press.
“So in the novel I’m driving at the idea that justice and freedom don’t wait. It’s not, well, you need to suffer just a little more and then things are going to be peachy in fifty years. No. That was the rationale for colonialism and you can see the wreckage that left behind.”
Jen Julian talks with Joanna Eleftheriou about missing characters, science fiction, anglerfish husbands, and her new collection, Earthly Delights and Other Apocalypses, winner of this year’s Press 53 Award for Short Fiction.
“A close examination of economy and endings in this collection reveals several craft choices made by the author that consistently bolster efficiency and surprise.”
“It’s these aetherial worlds referred to in the title, these never-existing possibilities that Tolstaya explores through her writing. Texts, stories, are the essences that construct our lives. Whether consciously or unconsciously, whether intentionally fabricating or telling our version of the truth, we’re creating, with language, a narrative.”
Venita Blackburn and Malinda McCollum talk about dangerous women in short fiction, loss as a narrative catalyst, the stories of ZZ Packer and David Foster Wallace, and their own recently published collections.
“She captures so beautifully the isolation that many feel in an increasingly cloistered Midwest, the desperation we all experience in our teeter-totter of needs and wants”: Mike Ferro appreciates Laura Hulthen Thomas’s “Sole Suspect” in this Stories We Love essay.
