From the Archives: Got a dreadful first novel stashed somewhere in the proverbial drawer? Take heart, dear writer. Roberto Bolaño will show you how to salvage from the wreck.
“. . .these two groups of women are indeed sisters under the skin, and these authors are sisters as well”: Ellen Prentiss Campbell on connecting Nesbit and Otsuka through their use of first-person plural.
“Why is intense, close connection so challenging to convey in fiction?”: Christina Ward-Niven looks to Miranda July, Rachel Cusk, and Stacey D’Erasmo to unpack narrative intimacy. Be sure to check out the first part of this essay, which appeared on Tuesday.
“Why is intense, close connection so challenging to convey in fiction?”: Christina Ward-Niven looks to Alice Munro and Stacey D’Erasmo to unpack narrative intimacy. Look out for part II of this essay on Thursday.
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.”
From the Archives: Celeste Ng offers compelling proof that storytellers aren’t so different from scientists: both explore the same very large, very dark, very crowded room, poking and prodding and tirelessly asking, what if?
Joshua Bodwell celebrates Black Sparrow Press’s fiftieth anniversary as a trade publisher—with five footnotes, one for each decade.
“With every fulfilled wish, the drama of the story is elevated”: Ayşe Papatya Bucak with some unconventional advice for crafting conflict.
From the Archives: “One frustration of writing a single essay about David Jauss’s craft essays and short stories is that every one is worthy of its own in-depth examination.”
“There I was, hiding in plain sight”: Kate Southwood on the impulse to uncover the truth behind the fiction.
From the Archives: In this 2011 essay, Baxter writes that a trustworthy review has “a kind of doubleness: the reviewer manages to assert somehow that the book under discussion is of some importance for one reason or another; and second, a good review provides a formal description of the book’s properties, so that you could reconstruct it from the reviewer’s sketch of it.”
“By peppering his prose with subtle, sinister details,” Jacob M. Appel argues in this craft essay, “Chaon manages to create a subtext of tension that supports the weight of the story’s content.”
