Logic and Revolution: Wang Xiaobo’s “The Golden Age”
by Andrew Felsher
“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.”
“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.
From the Archives: Friendship unraveling around exposed ambition – Jacinda Townsend talks with Melissa Scholes Young about competition, solidarity, and the constraints of the wider world.
From the Archives: Mary Stewart Atwell inaugurates a series of interviews with writers of rural fiction, undertaken in partnership with The Art of the Rural, by talking with Jack Driscoll.
Entering a piece of writing in a collaborative way is at the heart of what Fowles called the “I-thou” theory: no matter how many times a book is read, it is fundamentally a relationship—an encounter—between just two people.
From the Archives: “My overall feeling is that it likely took a lot of energy just to keep track of what was going on around me at home—to make sure everyone was okay and the day wasn’t going to veer off into territory that felt fraught and unstable.” Paula Saunders talks with Steven Wingate about her novel The Distance Home and the winner-take-all emotional violence that underpins America.
