Lara Zielin calls Sara Farizan’s new novel Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel “more than just a successful young-adult novel. It’s an intersection where a work of art meets a cultural shift at exactly the right moment.”
Eleanor J. Bader calls Lynn Kanter’s third novel, Her Own Vietnam, “a cogent rebuttal to politicians who wax poetic about the glory and honor of war and militarism.”
“William Gass’s ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country’ stands as an answer for what it means to write from the Midwest. Told in thirty-six discrete sections, this story is a devastatingly gorgeous meditation on loss and the rhythms of the Midwestern landscape.
Nichole Bernier talks to E.B. Moore about publishing her debut novel at 72: “The Amish life is exotic to behold and comforting, a little like going to a habitat zoo to watch the slow march of elephants cropping grass with their trunks and blowing dust over their backs.”
“I’ve been a high school English teacher for ten years, and I think being surrounded by kids all day has helped me to remember what it’s like to be young. I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to those years, but I still think it’s such a cool age. When you’re fifteen, everything is new and fresh; so much life happens.”
“Here’s the thing about writing historical fiction: you’re not trying to reconstruct or mimic history, which would be altogether boring even if it weren’t impossible. What you’re trying to do is to create a new version of it that will tell a good story while simultaneously capturing something essential, not only about the period, but also about contemporary life.”
“Even though recent history might seem to have betrayed Bezmozgis’ intentions, what’s important in The Betrayers are the people who live, toil, and suffer in Crimea and Israel-Palestine.”
“I usually feel like an aesthete, just trying to write decent sentences. But with this book I was aware of being a white guy consciously setting out to write about race and about certain feelings buried in white people and I wouldn’t be much of a writer if I was going to go into all of that and come out the other side having given it a trivial treatment and being okay with that.”
“More than anything, I wanted this book to take on the processed food industry. As a satirist, I wanted my novel to serve as a kind of corrective to it, if only by asking readers to question what it is they’re eating. But the food industry doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so it’s what it reveals about American life that is really at the center of the novel.”
Given the vast quantity of Alice/Carroll-inspired work, the reader might wonder: “Is there anything new to add?” Here, happily, Seabrook proves it is still possible to make an original contribution.
