Stories We Love: “The Expelled,” by Samuel Beckett
by Amber Wheeler Bacon
Amber Wheeler Bacon on learning to read Beckett’s “The Expelled.”
Amber Wheeler Bacon on learning to read Beckett’s “The Expelled.”
FWR editor Eric McDowell and Barrett Bowlin sit down to talk small presses, the fiction of shitty jobs, and Bowlin’s debut collection, Ghosts Caught on Film, winner of the Bridge Eight Press Fiction Prize.
George McCormick and Hemingway scholar Chris Warren discuss Hemingway’s under-appreciated connection to Yellowstone High Country, the inseparability of fiction and biography, and the short story he wishes Hemingway had written.
Barrett Bowlin on Deesha Philyaw’s “Eula” as a sales pitch to students for “why it’s so good and important and essential to read short stories overall.”
Benjamin Woodard and Michelle Ross talk microfiction vs. short stories, how to organize a book of 57 stories, and Ross’s new collection, They Kept Running, out now from the University of North Texas Press.
Shann Ray and Jess Walter discuss Walter’s latest collection, The Angel of Rome, out next month from Harper.
Taking cues from everyone from Don DeLillo and Toni Morrison to Roland Barthes and Carmen Maria Machado, Ayşe Papatya Bucak questions a key principle of conventional craft wisdom.
Kent Kosack on the complexities of motivation and action in Aimee Bender’s “Off.”
Danielle LaVaque-Manty and Holly Goddard Jones sit down to talk about fabulism vs. realism, teaching and learning from students, and Jones’s new collection, Antipodes.
From the Archives: “My overall feeling is that it likely took a lot of energy just to keep track of what was going on around me at home—to make sure everyone was okay and the day wasn’t going to veer off into territory that felt fraught and unstable.” Paula Saunders talks with Steven Wingate about her novel The Distance Home and the winner-take-all emotional violence that underpins America.
