Ellen Prentiss Campbell is the author of the novels Frieda’s Song (2021) and The Bowl with Gold Seams (2016, winner of the Indie Excellence Award for Historical Fiction), as well as the short story collections Known By Heart (2020) and Contents Under Pressure (2016, nominated for the National Book Award). Her short fiction has been featured in numerous journals, including The Massachusetts Review and The MacGuffin. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, her essays and reviews appear in Fiction Writers Review, where she is a contributing editor, the Washington Independent Review of Books, The New York Journal of Books, and others.
“In Schwartz’s fiction, as in life, it is often the unspoken or withheld that holds power”: Ellen Prentiss Campbell on the story “Stranger,” by Steven Schwartz, from his collection Madagascar.
From the Archives: What do the 2011 Japanese Tsunami, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and one family’s personal heartbreak have in common? For Ellen Prentiss Campbell, the answer lies in Pearl S. Buck’s 1948 young adult novel, The Big Wave, and the individual acts of creative defiance that help survivors not only carry on, but value life’s beauty more highly because they know it will not last.
“I read and I write to explore lives I haven’t lived. To encounter different lives, responses, experiences. Historical fiction can be something like the illumination of starlight, reaching us, seemingly alive and bright, years after.”
“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.
Ellen Prentiss Campbell meditates on the influence of teachers, fulfilling promises, and becoming who we’re meant to be in this homage to her teacher Sally Nash.
“Reading these stories at times feels almost like complicit voyeurism—witnessing pain through a one-way mirror in the laboratory of Nors’s world.” Ellen Prentiss Campbell reviews Dorthe Nors’s new collection, Wild Swims, out tomorrow from Graywolf.
“I wanted to understand why we do the same bad things over and over.” Ellen Prentiss Campbell interviews Ginger Eager about her debut novel, The Nature of Remains, out now from New Issues.
“The novel is narrated as an episodic composite, linked by the author’s narrative conceit: a persistent Argentinian journalist has been seeking to interview elusive, reclusive Watanabe.” Ellen Prentiss Cambell reviews Fracture, by Andrés Neuman.
“Nesbit’s empathy is as evident and important here as her commitment to accuracy”: Ellen Prentiss Campbell on TaraShea Nesbit’s new novel, Beheld.
“Enright works magic here, making visible in Actress the primal origin stories embedded in and surrounding our own, tracing the most intricate of spirals: a double helix—two strands of connected story.”
