The Girls, by Emma Cline
by Polly Stewart
“Should we fear these women or sympathize with them, or—somehow—manage to do both?”: Mary Stewart Atwell reviews Emma Cline’s debut novel, The Girls, out this month from Random House.
Polly Stewart is the author of The Good Ones, forthcoming from Harper in 2023, and a Contributing Editor at Fiction Writers Review. As Mary Stewart Atwell, she’s also the author of Wild Girls. She teaches English and creative writing at Virginia Military Institute.
“Should we fear these women or sympathize with them, or—somehow—manage to do both?”: Mary Stewart Atwell reviews Emma Cline’s debut novel, The Girls, out this month from Random House.
“Indeed, the Keatings’ struggles take on a historical and even mythic dimension that gives them significance beyond the merely personal”: Mary Stewart Atwell on Ausbel’s latest novel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty.
“So little of the book was clear to me when I began writing”: Garth Greenwell discusses What Belongs to You, his debut novel from Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, with Mary Stewart Atwell.
Continuing our interview series with writers of rural fiction, Mary Stewart Atwell talks with Bonnie Jo Campbell about her newest collection, Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, as well as nostalgia versus reality, novels as failed stories, and more.
“I am tempted to spin you a story about a chance boyhood encounter in the deep forest with a wild hog that left me scarred and terrified and thus writing out my fear and horror for the rest of time, but I’ll restrain the impulse.” Pinckney Benedict talks with Mary Stewart Atwell in this second interview in a series on rural fiction.
Saldin nails the caustic appeal of troubled teens at a wilderness reform school.
Known for stories and novels that force us to question the conventional dichotomy between realist and fantasy fiction, Kevin Brockmeier knows how to reveal the strangeness of the world around us. In conversation with Mary Stewart Atwell, Brockmeier discusses his new novel, The Illumination, and the compelling metaphors that inform his writing.
Polly Atwell talks with Andrew Porter about how crafting stories is like editing film, what particular advantages peripheral narrators can afford, and why it’s “completely surreal” to hear actors read from your work.
J. Robert Lennon’s Pieces for the Left Hand is a collection of 100 linked short short stories–linked by their location, a small upstate New York town that resembles Lennon’s hometown of Ithaca, and by their narrator, described as “unemployed, and satisfied to be unemployed.”
McGurl, a professor of English at UCLA, is a literary scholar who actually likes writers. More amazingly, he likes MFA programs. In The Program Era, published by Harvard University Press, McGurl argues that the rise of the MFA program in the twentieth century made a uniquely significant contribution to the excellence of postwar American literature.
