“Reading this novel in the time of COVID, as workers suffer, in massive proportions, through financial and psychological implications of job loss, is like sucking air through a cavity.” Josie Tolin on Hilary Leichter’s debut, Temporary.
“I’m playing with the question of fate but also social mobility. How much do we become the people our family situation predicted we would?” Debra Jo Immergut talks with Sharon Harrigan about her debut novel, Half, writing in first-person plural, darkness in fiction, desire, and more.
“I’ve always had an urge to transcend, to go beyond”: Sharon Solwitz talks with Maggie Kast about her new book, Side by Side but Never Face to Face.
“The stories here show simultaneously how life is lived and what it feels like to be Black, rendered in ways that are honest and brutal.” Jessica Sullivan on “The Finkelstein 5” from Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s collection Friday Black.
“The tension between whether a story wants to be long or short requires us to examine them together.” Melissa Scholes Young thinks about form and story containers by engaging with the work of R.L. Maizes.
“Fiction writers—like gardeners skilled with pruning shears working on a young plant—can bring a tremendous sense of shape to their work by cutting off opportunities for potential even while the work itself is in its infancy.” Steven Wingate draws from Robert Olen Butler’s short-short fiction to advocate for constraint.
Josie Tolin on how George Saunders uses a sense of familial inevitability “to both subvert and amplify what might otherwise be a run-of-the-mill, bad-dad situation” in his story “Sticks.”
“Ford has long been something of a roamer, both in life and in his fiction, and that roaming and the restlessness which drives it are front and center in Sorry for Your Trouble.” Travis Holland reviews Richard Ford’s new collection.
“I’m interested specifically in the inner turmoil, the emotional price and weight, of self-betrayal and deception as it is experienced and enacted by queer people.” Lee Thomas talks with Peter Kispert about his debut collection.
“I think that the whole project of fiction is that you’re asking somebody to leave themselves and be somebody else in this fictive space”: Catherine Lacey talks with Danielle Lavaque-Manty about short fiction, identity shedding, the poetics of sentences, and more.
