Anne Stameshkin

In case you missed them, here’s a roundup of recent features from FWR: In an interview with Christopher Mohar, author and teacher Anthony Doerr discusses his curiosity about the world and “engaging with factual information for fictive purposes”: What I work to dispel in my students is the prevailing myth that inspiration comes like a light bulb over the head, a lightning stroke to the spleen, and all we have to do as artists is wait for the lightning and then transcribe it. I think instead work comes from hundreds or thousands of hours of working through things, from pouring […]

Here’s a roundup of the latest features FWR was pleased to bring you over the past two weeks: T.L. Crum reviews Michelle Hoover’s debut novel The Quickening: The Quickening follows the journeys of two Iowa families trying to build their lives amid the hardships of the Great Depression. Like Hoover, I’m a descendent of Iowa farmers, so I was interested in this story, curious to learn what my ancestors might have encountered as they built their farms in early 1900s, when so much was at stake and so little could be counted on. While there are subtle references to what […]

Hiding out from the heat wave this weekend? Here’s the perfect reading material while you seek out some A/C: FWR’s features from the past two weeks, including three reviews of debut novels and an interview with a veteran: Michael Rudin reviews Hesh Kestin’s The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats, observing: In the end, Iron Will isn’t about denial, it’s about confrontation. The confrontation of a Jewish people against the hardships they faced in World War II—“In melting-pot America [Jews] were heat-resistant, tempered by several thousand years of being close to, if not in, history’s fires”—just as it is about the […]

In case you missed them, here are the latest features, which FWR was proud to publish over the past month: Greg Schutz reviews American Salvage, by Bonnie Jo Campbell, noting that many of the stories [evoke] the ache at the center of the rural experience with startling clarity and force. The stories in American Salvage know what it means to occupy landscapes in which humans are outnumbered by animals and in which nature, beautiful and indifferent, rushes in to fill the physical and emotional distances between individuals. Reviewing Laura van den Berg‘s debut collection What the World Will Look Like […]