“Driscoll was a poet before turning to fiction. Poetic language is dreamlike, and therefore suited to close narration. And Driscoll’s elegant language anchors the reader in the haunting dream.”
“As a novelist, my favorite fictional conceit is simply to shove a lot of things into one character’s life. In the case of Jacinto, I made him experience virtually all of the anecdotes I’d read about or heard of—from all over Mexico and the American West.”
“Remember, as you read this small book, generally and specifically about love, remember that suffering is, after all, the Latin root for passion”: Ellen Prentiss Campbell on Julian Barnes’s new novel.
“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.
“The work of being a writer involves a continual examination of one’s work, one’s own self, as well as one’s biases, in relationship to the wider world”: Kaitlin Solimine chats with Hasanthika Sirisena about her debut novel, Empire of Glass, out now from Ig Publishing.
“There is so much published that is all the same. Yet there burns that desire to create something that does not exist. Especially for the Ozarks. Something that is not exactly like anything else under the sun.”
“I believe that a little piece of the supernatural, of the metaphysical, and of the unknown placed within the realm of the known is how—at least to the West African mind—the world works.”
“Haigh presents no over-simplified white hats and black hats in her story. Instead, Haigh gets inside frackers, locals, and activists alike, finding flawed, warm individuals in all camps.”
Richard Hawley talks with Mindy Misener about youth, revelations, the origins of his new novel, and more.
“Most salient, however, is the way in which Veá inhabits his characters to evince what is clearly a deeply felt responsibility toward the victims of wrongful death”: Julian Anderson on Alfredo Veá’s new novel, The Mexican Flyboy.
