“In Slimani’s novel, the burden placed upon women to care for children balances alongside the treatment and perceptions of immigrant women. And rendering these issues to subtext, rather than treating them head-on and politically, the narrative forces the reader to become complicit in the shoddy treatment of others for the sake of convenience and creature comforts.”
From the Archives: “The narrator has spent most of her life in other people’s shadows, but through her storytelling asserts an identity that’s no longer tethered to another, one released only by disgrace.”
“. . .these two groups of women are indeed sisters under the skin, and these authors are sisters as well”: Ellen Prentiss Campbell on connecting Nesbit and Otsuka through their use of first-person plural.
“Beard’s story explores a unique domestic backstory in the development of the atomic bomb as experienced by both witting and unwitting participants.”
From the Archives: Charles Johnson is the author of numerous books, including the National Book Award-winning Middle Passage. Zachary Watterson, one of Johnson’s former students, spoke with his mentor in 2010 about the literary friendships that have influenced the author’s more than forty-year writing career.
From the Archives: “Quatro’s stories are often fabulist, if fabulism is magical realism plus a reckoning.” Rebecca Scherm on Jamie Quatro’s debut collection, I Want to Show You More.
From the Archives: In this 2010 interview Charlotte Boulay talks with Hannah Tinti about the influence of art in her work, how writers find their subject matter, her editorial approach at One Story, and trusting your gut during the drafting process, among other subjects.
From the Archives: “Work can be your life, but your life can (and I’d argue, should be) bigger than your work”: Danielle Lazarin on writing, motherhood, and how the things in our lives that we give ourselves permission to experience that aren’t writing might in the end offer us new perspectives on both writing and our selves.
“To bring the scene vividly alive in your mind and then to transfer that vividness to the reader takes imagination. There’s no way around that. This is why History and Historical Fiction are two separate genres.” John Vanderslice talks to Garry Craig Powell about his new novel, The Last Days of Oscar Wilde.
From the Archives: Chloe Benjamin speaks with her mentor and friend Judith Claire Mitchell about A Reunion of Ghosts, which took ten years to write. Mitchell says of the process, “When students are struggling with their own novels, I do understand what they’re going through and I think I’m often able to give them perspective on the nature of this massive, unwieldy, impossible enterprise that keeps them from giving up.”
