“Despite how powerfully the objects of our lives might obsess us or orient our attention, they are but one aspect of a larger lived experienced.” Costa B. Pappas on Clare Sestanovich’s debut collection, Objects of Desire, out soon from Knopf.
“Where Murakami truly shines in this collection is where he always has as a writer: when what’s on the page departs reality, when it embraces the odd and the strange.” Travis Holland reviews Haruki Murakami’s newest collection.
“Maybe how we choose to tell the stories of our pain can allow us to turn that pain into something greater, something necessary, something that might ease the pain of others.” Karin Killian on narrative technique in Lauren Groff’s “The Wind.”
“Ethnographic fiction, and all fiction in general, depends on Kierkegaardian leaps of imaginative faith, which is not the same thing as an ‘anything goes’ world in which facts don’t matter.” JT Torres on variation and verisimilitude.
“Site Fidelity is a delight to read at the sentence and individual story scale, but it truly becomes a marvel when viewed as a collection.” Michael Welch reviews Claire Boyles’s debut story collection, out soon from W.W. Norton.
Alexander Weinstein and Garry Craig Powell discuss spirituality, vulnerability, and Weinstein’s latest collection, Universal Love.
“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.
Kent Kosack on retrospective narration in J.D. Salinger’s “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period.”
In this essay on Robert Stone’s final collection, Fun with Problems, Frank Freeman explores the writer’s mellower, sweeter—and funnier—side.
“You can’t change the past. You can reinvent it. Memory’s your accomplice in that. Memory is like water. Memory is imagination pointing backwards.” Mikhail Iossel talks with Ian Ross Singleton about his new story collection, Love Like Water, Love Like Fire.
