J.T. Bushnell is the author of the novel The Step Back. His short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in more than twenty literary journals and are available online at Flyway, Monkeybicycle, and Brevity. His essays about writing have also been published in Poets & Writers magazine, The Writer magazine, and The Science of Story: The Brain Behind Creative Nonfiction. He teaches at Oregon State University in Corvallis and lives in Eugene with his wife and two daughters. To see what he’s reading, follow him on Twitter: @JTBushnell1.
From the Archives: After waiting impatiently for Daniel Orozco’s debut story collection, J.T. Bushnell finds that it exceeds all expectations. Bushnell calls these stories “full of satire and absurdity and insight.”
With the impending release of his debut novel, The Step Back, J.T. Bushnell meditates on intersections and departures in our fiction.
J.T. Bushnell on how Michael Deagler’s “New Poets” makes us rethink an old trope: the antagonist.
From the Archives: J.T. Bushnell on Amy Tan’s “Rules of the Game,” a “quintessentially American story, one that has roots in a literary tradition that dates back to Flaubert and Chekhov.”
“It’s an exciting book, full of high-stakes drag races, dangerous driving, crimes and betrayals, and gut-wrenching close calls, all rendered with Harrison’s literary sensibilities.”
“The Point” does everything stories are supposed to, and many things they aren’t. It begins with a dream, for example, and ends with backstory, both big violations of craft and yet somehow perfect.
The best stories channel all the variety of their subject matter to the same place. They use it to worm into those mysterious depths that underlie human experience, those facets of existence we can each recognize despite the different lives we lead—connection, compassion, loyalty, betrayal, loss, failure.
Robert Boswell’s new novel adopts an unusual point of view: unreliable omniscience. And though the author’s execution of this bizarre form is provocative when it finally culminates, that’s not the reason Tumbledown is such an absorbing read.
J.T. Bushnell on Amy Tan’s “Rules of the Game,” a “quintessentially American story, one that has roots in a literary tradition that dates back to Flaubert and Chekhov.”
J.T. Bushnell reviews Benjamin Lytal’s coming-of-age debut novel, “a vision of youth from the inside.”
