“Re-reading this story now, after the terrible years of Covid, in the shadow of the ghastly war in Ukraine, as famine stalks Africa and the Middle East, one understands the dream of escape.” Lee Thomas on Tamas Dobozy’s story “The Restoration of the Villa Where Tibor Kálmán Once Lived.”
Shann Ray and Jess Walter discuss Walter’s latest collection, The Angel of Rome, out next month from Harper.
Taking cues from everyone from Don DeLillo and Toni Morrison to Roland Barthes and Carmen Maria Machado, Ayşe Papatya Bucak questions a key principle of conventional craft wisdom.
Kent Kosack on the complexities of motivation and action in Aimee Bender’s “Off.”
“Wang’s understated wit and distinctive tone is undeniable, conjuring up connections to Kafka’s logic-riddled restraint, Camus’s detachment, and Lu Xun’s dark humor.”
Danielle LaVaque-Manty and Holly Goddard Jones sit down to talk about fabulism vs. realism, teaching and learning from students, and Jones’s new collection, Antipodes.
“In Schwartz’s fiction, as in life, it is often the unspoken or withheld that holds power”: Ellen Prentiss Campbell on the story “Stranger,” by Steven Schwartz, from his collection Madagascar.
Join us for our fourteenth-annual celebration of the short story, as we dedicate the month of May to short fiction.
From the Archives: Unlike the memoirist, who promises to tell the truth, the fiction writer says, “I am going to tell you a lie, but at the end you will feel it is true.” He or she is a kind of magician who makes sure you know the flames are only an illusion before letting you burn your fingers.
From the Archives: as the annual observance of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) approaches this evening, we return to a 2011 essay by Erika Dreifus on the literary kinship among fictional works from an emerging cohort of “3G” (third-generation) Jewish writers: Julie Orringer, Alison Pick, and Natasha Solomons.
