Poetry for Fiction Writers: Five Recommendations
by Katie Umans
Fiction writers are often the first to prostrate themselves and say they don’t get poetry, but these five recommendations have been hand-picked for prosers.
Fiction writers are often the first to prostrate themselves and say they don’t get poetry, but these five recommendations have been hand-picked for prosers.
Four writer-readers chat about Richard Price’s novel Lush Life and David Simon’s critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire.
In a world insatiable for celebrity access, where there are reality shows about reality shows, and magazines shriek that the stars are “just like us!” whenever one buys a latte, pops out a baby, or heads for rehab, it seems redundant to ask if we’ve gone too far. But that’s exactly what Theresa Rebeck does with Three Girls and Their Brother, and, for the most part, it works.
Donald Ray Pollock’s debut collection Knockemstiff begins with an epigraph from satirist Dawn Powell: “All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.” And yet, when it comes to Knockemstiff, Ohio—Pollock’s hometown and the purgatorial setting for these eighteen gritty stories—the fictional inhabitants rarely leave.
In Will Allison’s first novel, What You Have Left, the fragmented structure is an appropriate mirror for the Greers, a family torn apart and alternately struggling and refusing to reconstruct itself.
The head of the MacRinnalch clan is dead, and Kalix MacRinnalch might be responsible. Relentlessly pursued by hunters and by her family, the lonely werewolf girl makes her way through modern-day London, downing laudanum as a temporary escape from her troubles.
Filled with wonder and a sense of infinite possibility, Samantha Hunt’s second novel, The Invention of Everything Else, celebrates the boundless human creativity suggested in its title.
In her debut novel, The God of Animals, Aryn Kyle illuminates how uncomfortable—physically and emotionally—it is to grow up.
In a city of artists, where creation and revision are always the order of the day, New York real estate players can’t help but get into the game.
Anton Chekhov is a C-9A Nightingale. Cormac McCarthy is a Focke-Wulf Butcher-Bird with cowboy boot decals. Lorrie Moore is a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. Fun, right?
Set in and around the fictional town of Vaughn, Brown’s stories contain characters driven by duty and guilt down paths furrowed by their own lapses and eccentricities. A cloud of fatalism hangs over many; the weight of the past—personal, familial, historical—presses constantly at their backs.
Divisadero follows three characters through childhood to adolescence on a farm in Northern California’s gold country, a world where the boom is long gone but danger and desperation linger.
