Suspend Your Disbelief

Travis Holland

Contributing Editor

Travis Holland is the author of The Archivist’s Story (Dial Press), a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. In 2007, The Archivist’s Story was listed among the best books of the year by Publisher’s Weekly and the Financial Times, and was a GuardianReaders’ Pick. Travis is the winner of the 2008 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and has been nominated for the 2009 Impac Dublin prize. His stories have previously appeared in PloughsharesGlimmer TrainFive Points,and The Quarterly. He lives in Ann Arbor.


Articles

Interviews |

Influences: An Interview with Tobias Wolff

From the Archives: Travis Holland talks with fiction master Tobias Wolff about the pleasures and anxieties of influence, the changing societal role of writer-celebrities, and the reasons Wolff has “always been attracted to the incisiveness, velocity, exactitude, precision of the short story.”


Essays |

Present Everywhere, Visible Nowhere: Flaubert’s Eye for Detail

“What a bitch of a thing prose is!” Gustave Flaubert wrote in a letter to his lover Louise Colet in 1852. “It’s never finished; there’s always something to redo. Yet I think one can give it the consistency of verse. A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.” In this essay, contributing editor Travis Holland meditates on Flaubert’s influence and legacy in fiction.