“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.”
“Whether a novel is set in motion by a strange event, has an incredulous premise, or is riddled with bizarre scenes and interactions, they all demand a compelling response that aligns with the physics of the fictive world.” Andrew Felsher on how strangeness in fiction can illuminate and reveal.
“Write about it? I couldn’t bear thinking about it.” Jaimee Wriston Colbert on the role a traumatic experience played in the development of her novel How Not to Drown.
“But if we don’t try, if we don’t look privilege squarely in the eye, then privilege is all we will see.” In part II of this essay on subject position in fiction, Leah De Forest looks at Z.Z. Packer’s “Brownies” and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.
“The focus here isn’t on point of view, but on positioning: a way of thinking about who a character is as well as who they are in relation to the others in the world of the story.” In part I of this essay on subject position in fiction, Leah De Forest explores Allan Gurganus’s “Blessed Assurance.”
Elaine Neil Orr on the mysterious process of fiction writing and the faith it takes to attempt it.
“Manning and Som’s work don’t feel brave necessarily in subject matter—a well-established queer literature exists—but in their refusal to pander to their literary audience, to provide anything that looks like false intimacy.” Hasanthika Sirisena on our assumptions about interiority and representing queer experiences in short fiction.
In this essay on Robert Stone’s final collection, Fun with Problems, Frank Freeman explores the writer’s mellower, sweeter—and funnier—side.
“When these stories occur—both in life and in fiction—there can be an almost a ghostly quality that arises.” Drawing on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Stuart Dybek, and Jhumpa Lahiri, Tyler McAndrew illuminates the narrator on the sidelines, caught between actor and observer.
Jennifer Solheim on the art of telling in Nathacha Appanah’s Tropic of Violence, examining how the author’s “use of perspective and authority might serve as an example of how writers can develop characters whose social identities are different from their own, in ways that are palpable, believable, and move beyond empathy.”
Nicole Nelson on defamiliarization in Amy Hempel’s syntax in Tumble Home.
Scott Nadelson on disorientation as a craft technique in the work of writers like Jamel Brinkley, Mansoura Ez-Eldin, and Eduardo Halfon.
