Stories We Love: “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” by J.D. Salinger
by Kent Kosack
Kent Kosack on retrospective narration in J.D. Salinger’s “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period.”
Kent Kosack on retrospective narration in J.D. Salinger’s “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period.”
In this essay on Robert Stone’s final collection, Fun with Problems, Frank Freeman explores the writer’s mellower, sweeter—and funnier—side.
Jamie Yourdon and Aurelie Sheehan chat about research, power dynamics, and Yourdon’s new novel, The Space Between Two Deaths.
Melanie Finn sits down to talk with Benjamin Woodard about her latest novel, The Hare, out now from Two Dollar Radio.
Katey Schultz and Patricia Ann McNair talk bad characters, breaking rules, and McNair’s latest collection, Responsible Adults.
“His narrator’s point of view evolves with the story, revealing this evolution through how he sees his setting”: Kent Kosack on Tobias Wolff’s subtle gem “Powder.”
“One of the things that was really important to me was to find a structure that was different in order to talk about nature, to talk about climate change.” Alexander Tilney asks Madeleine Watts about writing climate change and her debut novel, The Inland Sea.
“When these stories occur—both in life and in fiction—there can be an almost a ghostly quality that arises.” Drawing on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Stuart Dybek, and Jhumpa Lahiri, Tyler McAndrew illuminates the narrator on the sidelines, caught between actor and observer.
“My goal is to make fiction that doesn’t read too much like ‘life,’ stories that repress the urges and impulses of characters.” Aaron Hamburger and Avner Landes discuss Landes’s debut novel, Meiselman: The Lean Years, out this week from Tortoise Books.
Amy Gustine talks with Kate Reed Petty about the structural features of her new novel, True Story, exploring not just what kind of story she’s written, but how she pulled it off.
