Several Compelling Realities: An Interview with Jon Sealy
Eleanor J. Bader talks with Jon Sealy about his third novel, The Merciful, as well as morality, ethics, the state of Southern literature, the business of publishing, and the pandemic.
Eleanor J. Bader talks with Jon Sealy about his third novel, The Merciful, as well as morality, ethics, the state of Southern literature, the business of publishing, and the pandemic.
“We need to stop pretending the story just comes on its own and isn’t within the writer’s control.” Matthew Salesses and Ayşe Papatya Bucak talk craft, workshop, and his new book, Craft in the Real World, out now from Catapult.
“Reading these stories at times feels almost like complicit voyeurism—witnessing pain through a one-way mirror in the laboratory of Nors’s world.” Ellen Prentiss Campbell reviews Dorthe Nors’s new collection, Wild Swims, out tomorrow from Graywolf.
“I don’t feel compromised by the genre.” Jennifer Pashley talks with Barrett Bowlin about her first thriller, The Watcher, out now from Crooked Lane Books.
“How many breakthroughs like that can a writer have?” Pamela Painter chats with Steve Yarbrough about her work over the years and her new collection, Fabrications: New and Selected Stories.
“I think the South is worth fighting for, with all its issues. I think it’s worth fighting for change here.” Eleanor J. Bader interviews Kasey Thornton about her debut collection, Lord the One You Love Is Sick, the writing process, and life in the contemporary South.
“I wrote out of a kind of homesickness, I guess, and out of a sickness of spirit over what was happening at the border, the dehumanization of children.” Melanie Bishop interviews Beth Alvarado about her new collection, Jillian in the Borderlands, out this week from Black Lawrence Press.
Edward Hamlin talks with Rachel Swearingen about her debut collection, How to Walk on Water, as well as her roots as a writer and a Midwesterner, challenges women face in harmonizing public and private personas, and more.
“When it comes to the Holocaust and the Apollo program, we have an added sense that they both seem impossible. These two events represent the worst of what we are capable of doing to each other, and also the best of what we are capable of doing together.” Hannah Redder talks with Patrick Hicks about Nazi concentration camps, America’s space program, and his second Holocaust novel, In the Shadow of Dora.
“I saw a parallel in the way the body attacks itself in an autoimmune disease to the way guilt attacks the mind. The bodies of many of these characters define, in some ways, the boundaries of their lives.” Alexander Tilney talks with the most recent Prairie Schooner Book Prize winner, Megan Cummins, about her short story collection If the Body Allows It.