Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of The Green Shore (Simon & Schuster, 2012), which takes place in Athens and Paris between 1967 and 1973. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Ninth Letter, Salon, Granta, Glimmer Train, Virginia Quarterly Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, The Millions, The New York Times, and the 2010 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Her book reviews appear regularly in the San Francisco Chronicle. She’s the recipient of fellowships from the Camargo Foundation, the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, and the MacDowell Colony. In 2014-2015 she was a Fulbright Research Scholar in Greece. She is on the Creative Writing faculty at Wayne State University.
From the Archives: “The narrator has spent most of her life in other people’s shadows, but through her storytelling asserts an identity that’s no longer tethered to another, one released only by disgrace.”
“Driscoll is the master of capturing a delicate humanity where most people might be least likely to look”: Natalie Bakopoulos on Jack Driscoll’s The Goat Fish and the Lover’s Knot, out this spring from Wayne State University Press.
“The narrator has spent most of her life in other people’s shadows, but through her storytelling asserts an identity that’s no longer tethered to another, one released only by disgrace.”
“I heard Marilynne Robinson say once that “we can never escape the landscape of our preoccupations.” I was struck by that phrase and I think of it all the time, the landscape of our preoccupations. I feel liberated by it.”
Douglas Trevor talks about his debut novel, Girls I Know, how the narrative voice of a silent character can expand in fiction, the way landscapes—human and natural—can rebound from death, and more.
In her latest novel, Zadie Smith challenges the very notion of what we talk about when we talk about realism.
Marriage is so last century. Natalie Bakopoulos contemplates the demise of the marriage plot and Jeffrey Eugenides’s complex, undermining revival of it in his aptly-titled novel, The Marriage Plot. Is love still the ultimate trump card? Dear reader, it is. With some qualifications.
Editor’s note: What? Isn’t Short Story Month over? Yes, it is—but that doesn’t mean we stop loving short stories. So here’s an encore round of “Stories We Love.” In “Map of the City,” a story from her new collection Separate Kingdoms, Valerie Laken portrays the life of an American college student in perostroika-era Moscow. The story is brilliantly structured—the names of Moscow metro stations head the various sections, each of which captures a new moment in time and space and thereby mimics the experience of using the subway: you descend into one station and resurface at another. Perestroika, after all, […]
For the last several months, Harper’s staff, recently unionized, has been in conflict with the magazine’s publisher, John R. “Rick” MacArthur. The disagreements stem from various sources, which have been outlined in two recent articles in New York Magazine, here and here. In short: MacArthur is resistant to other avenues of revenue, including fund raising. Instead, having already cut the size and payroll of the editorial staff, which lost four senior editors and its web editor in 2010, MacArthur is now insisting that it’s necessary to lay off, immediately, two of the magazine’s most experienced editors, one of whom is […]
New South Books, an Alabama publisher, plans to release a version of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn wherein the n-word is replaced by the word “slave.” 219 times. The professor who originally approached the publisher with the idea did so because he himself felt uncomfortable using the word in class. I, of course, feel uncomfortable even writing it out. And if I were teaching Huck Finn, I wouldn’t utter it either, though its presence certainly wouldn’t keep me from teaching the book in the classroom and discussing this discomfort with my students. Needless to say, the release of this […]
Stories We Love: “White Angel,” by Michael Cunningham
Stories We Love: Donald Barthelme’s “The School,” In Which is Revealed the Meaning of Life
Stories We Love: "A Small, Good Thing" by Raymond Carver
Stories We Love: "The Fall River Axe Murders," by Angela Carter
Stories We Love: "Incarnations of Burned Children"
