I’d Found What I Was Looking For: An Interview with Lisa Borders
by Michelle Hoover
Michelle Hoover talks with novelist Lisa Borders about the pleasures and anxieties of crafting a novel.
Michelle Hoover talks with novelist Lisa Borders about the pleasures and anxieties of crafting a novel.
“I can only write if I have stolen something valuable that day”: Shawn Andrew Mitchell asks Jesse Ball about lies, dreams, and his latest novel, Silence Once Begun.
“On a strip of paper on my kitchen wall are the words “Thinking is for morons.” I’m much more prone to that way of being in the world, both on and off the page.”
There are images from Kyle Minor’s stories that will stick with me to the grave: a man laying hands on a dying man’s tumor, a preacher baking biscuits at a boy’s funeral. These images sear because they get at the gruesome failures of life. The preacher bakes biscuits in a gimmicky bid for consolation. There seems no true feeling in his action, and so it falls far short of the gravity of the moment. The man with the tumor thinks the narrator of “Seven Stories about Sebastian of Koulev-Ville” is the healer come to pray over him. The narrator has […]
“The stories I love most are the ones that feel novelistic in scope, where you can feel the writer pouring absolutely everything [they have] into the story, until there’s nothing left in them and they have to try to imagine an entirely new world.”
“Even when I walked away from the novel for years at a time, I knew I had something, and I knew I’d want to return to it. I needed it to be right, and I needed closure.”
I don’t read post-apocalyptic fiction, but I will read about anything by Lane Kareska. Lane and I were MFA students together at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Over our three years in the program, Lane and I met almost weekly outside of class to workshop our own work. We supported each other as our literary voices emerged. But when he told me that he was publishing North Dark (Sirens Call Publications, 2013), a novella, set in sparse futuristic failed state, I all but rolled my eyes. It’s not that I don’t see value in science fiction or the end of […]
Virginia Pye’s debut novel, River of Dust (Unbridled Books), was an Indie Next Pick for May 2013. Carolyn See, in the Washington Post, called it “mysterious, exotic, creepy—everything ignorant foreigners used to believe China to be.” And in his blurb, Robert Olen Butler hailed the novel as “a major book by a splendid writer.” River of Dust is a gripping historical adventure, set in rural China in 1910, which opens with a parent’s worst fear: kidnapping. The book is also a lyrical psychological and spiritual meditation, as the search for the American missionary couple’s stolen son becomes nothing less than a search for “the […]
“Could Biology take place anywhere but New York?” Emily Schultze asks Jacob M. Appel about his new novel, The Biology of Luck, a modern-day take on Ulysses. “No,” Appel replies. “In my psychotic moments I thought maybe I’d put it in Dublin, but then I always came to my senses.”
“Trying to see the world as others might seems like an act of respect to me—so long as it isn’t done cynically or sloppily.” Skip Horack talks to Tom Bennitt about work, religion, and history in his fiction.
Alex Shakespeare talks with William Boyle about his first novel, Gravesend, which releases this month, as well as leaving a place to write about it, crime as character study, and what we get from novels that we can’t find in other art forms.
Nina Buckless talks with Peter Orner about his most recent collection, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, as well as writing silence, where characters think they belong, and how gossip can reveal story.
