“It’s an act of communication of something that I wasn’t sure I was allowed to say to somebody who wasn’t sure they were allowed to feel what they were feeling.” Peter Ho Davies talks with Travis Holland about his new novel, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself.
With the impending release of his debut novel, The Step Back, J.T. Bushnell meditates on intersections and departures in our fiction.
“I wanted to infuse the book with a sense of hauntedness, and I realized that one way to do that was to let the victims who are at the center of the novel act as a Greek chorus.” Caitlin Mullen talks with Daisy Alpert Florin about her debut novel, Please See Us, which is currently a 2021 Edgar Allen Poe Award finalist for Best First Novel.
“The rubble of what happens is the real souvenir in these stories: memento mori, reminder not just of time gone by, but of death, always there, always approaching.” Ellen Prentiss Campbell on Elizabeth McCracken’s new collection, The Souvenir Museum.
J.T. Bushnell on how Michael Deagler’s “New Poets” makes us rethink an old trope: the antagonist.
“If the book strides beyond the noir conventions, as you suggest and certainly I hope, it does so especially to please a couple of ideal readers I had in mind as I wrote it, readers who loved language as much as they ever loved anything….” Charles Lamar Phillips talks with James Whorton, Jr. about his novel Estranged.
Robert L. Shuster examines works of fiction that purport to be real accounts, analyzing how authenticating elements influence our engagement with stories, as well as how these techniques shaped his own debut novel, To Zenzi.
“There are those who think comic novels are not serious novels. Tell that to Chaucer, Dickens, Heller, Vonnegut, among others. Tell it to Shakespeare! Humor is just a different way to tell a story.” John Blumenthal talks with Nina Buckless about his new comic novel, The Strange Courtship of Abigail Bird.
“The writer has no expiration date. I left my corporate career at fifty-six and turned to writing full time. I had no illusion it would be easy.” Dawn Ryan talks with Paul Vidich about his new novel, The Mercenary.
“There’s plenty of great fiction about belonging to a place and being part of a community—with the opportunities and obligations this brings—but that’s not a state of being I understand well.” Steven Wingate talks with Melissa Scholes Young about The Leave-Takers.
