Man V. Nature, by Diane Cook
by Avery DiUbaldo
Diane Cook’s Man V. Nature is a “masterful blend of surrealism, fabulist storytelling, and good-old-fashioned apocalyptic fiction.”
Diane Cook’s Man V. Nature is a “masterful blend of surrealism, fabulist storytelling, and good-old-fashioned apocalyptic fiction.”
On her most recent collection, Almost Famous Women: “I was fascinated by the orbit of fame, the way it influences a power dynamic, or the way we are so quick to be reverent of greatness.”
Burning through Adam Haslett’s “Notes to my Biographer”
Adam Rapp—novelist, playwright, musician, and director—on creating scenic tension: “Asking questions about exits and entrances and trying to keep people in rooms is the ultimate goal.”
“Then you sit back one day and think, ‘Who really will care about this? It’s just another story that’s been told so many times, just in different ways.’ Yet there is that illogical reasoning, or rather lack thereof, that makes you continue.”
Aida Zilelian on discovering that her novel The Legacy of Lost Things was about longing: “You know when you dream something, and you’re like, ‘I had such a weird dream,’ and as you’re saying the words out loud, you realize what the dream was actually about. When I read through the final version, I realized it then.”
“These are your people, like it or not, Kaufman tell us; you might as well love them anyway.”
Bich Minh Nguyen talks to Sarah Layden about her latest novel, Pioneer Girl, and moving from the Midwest to the West Coast: “For me, writing is always about looking back and looking forward in the same moment. It’s living within more than sphere, identity, and place, and trying to understand that—trying to find a few moments of stillness and clarity.”
“Accept the slightly soft focus and it becomes part of the charm of Gaynor’s particular book”: Ellen Prentiss Campbell on the pleasures of reading Hazel Gaynor’s historical novel A Memory of Violets.
“[Henderson] invites us to this place like she might a sleepover between friends, sharing the stories of adolescent wonders and tragedies the way young girls share gossip.”
