“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.
“This time, I’m just going to bang it out. Then a year later I’m just getting started”: Joshua Max Feldman in conversation with Jesse Hassenger on Thanksgiving, music, and his second novel, Start Without Me, out now from HarperCollins.
“This novel has consumed me”: Maryl Jo Fox chats with Diana Wagman about her debut novel, Clara at the Edge, out next Tuesday from She Writes Press.
“Rather, for Skinner, it’s writing and reading that triumph”: Mari Carlson reviews Woody Skinner’s debut collection, A Thousand Distant Radios, out today from Atelier26 Books.
From the Archives: Benjamin Percy chats with Brandon Dudley about his 2015 novel, The Dead Lands, genre fiction, fatherhood, and more.
“The cartoons were drawn in that state of horror, panic, sleeplessness, despair”: Tom Toro chats with Jennifer Solheim about Trump, the intersection of comedy and politics, and Tiny Hands, his book of New Yorker cartoons, out now from Dock Street Press.
“We tend to think of being an artist in terms of inspiration, but we also need to know how to work”: Kali VanBaale chats with Sophfronia Scott about misbehaving characters, what writers can learn from Bruce Springsteen, writing across genres, and Sophfronia’s new novel, Unforgivable Love, published this fall from William Morrow.
“I wanted to look seriously at a type of relationship that’s all but universal for girls and women, a close friendship between adolescents, and to accord it the attention and depth I believe it deserves”:
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.”
“Visitations is all about reckonings. Who are you at your most selfish, Upton asks, at your most desperate, your most monstrous?”: Emily Nagin on Lee Upton’s latest collection, out now from LSU Press.
