Barrett Bowlin sits down with Jennifer Pashley over cocktails just before her tour to promote the release of The Scamp, talking with her about this new book, her literary and musical influences, true crime sagas, and, inevitably, dead bodies.
“By peppering his prose with subtle, sinister details,” Jacob M. Appel argues in this craft essay, “Chaon manages to create a subtext of tension that supports the weight of the story’s content.”
“I was feeling quite self-satisfied when I showed [Dean Bakopoulos, friend and novelist] the passage that described Carolyn. I showed it to him because I thought, ‘Oh, he’s going to get a kick out of this; it’s pretty funny.’ And he comes back with, ‘Yes, it is funny, you’re right. But you can’t do this to her. She needs to have some dimension.’ I get those reminders in real life, too.” Mindy Misener chats with Michael Perry about his new novel, The Jesus Cow, and his transition from non-fiction to fiction.
“Growing up in Montgomery, I heard stories about the Civil Rights Movement from people who never became famous. That experience had an impact on my storytelling.”
“The events of 9/11 are integral to the novel’s structure and meaning, and to the Amendola family’s history and identity, but neither novel nor family are defined or constrained by the event.”
“Along the way, listening to writers at my dinner table speak of their work, their contracts, their advances, their sales, their ratings on Amazon, their competitors, etc, I came to realize how much it takes to carve out a career as an author, to live by the pen. At my present age, none of these concerns are mine.” Elena Delbacno discusses the perks of publishing later in life.
“I think influence is everywhere, right? We are influenced by places, people, what we overhear, what we see, what we do and what is done to us, various states of being.”
“Eventually, I made peace with the artifice: all of it is manipulated, all of it designed to form a cohesive whole. And then I really began to figure out potential connections between characters and events.”
“Yet the author’s honesty leaves everything on the table through every page turned”: Brian Bartels on Matt Sumell’s new collection, Making Nice.
