“Preparatory notes are like the pre-draft visualizations athletes use to prepare themselves for a difficult competitive task. If we want rich first drafts that will throw us into robust revisions, then it’s in our best interest to be free—even profligate—with our preparatory notes.” Steven Wingate talks about managing the work we do on our tales when we’re not actually writing them.
September 8th is National Ampersand Day. J. Alison Rosenblitt on the significance of the ampersand to E.E. Cummings and his poetry, as well as its use in the work of Ocean Vuong.
“The stories here show simultaneously how life is lived and what it feels like to be Black, rendered in ways that are honest and brutal.” Jessica Sullivan on “The Finkelstein 5” from Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s collection Friday Black.
“Homes delivers exactly on her narrator’s opening promise”: Barrett Bowlin on A.M. Homes’s cult classic short story “A Real Doll.”
“The truth of the story somehow comforts”: Kent Kosack on Lauren Groff’s “Ghosts and Empties.”
Josie Tolin on how George Saunders uses a sense of familial inevitability “to both subvert and amplify what might otherwise be a run-of-the-mill, bad-dad situation” in his story “Sticks.”
“It isn’t solace Emily and Eva are seeking, but a way to transform their pain.” Amber Wheeler Bacon on Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” and “Tell Me a Riddle.”
“It’s the story of a self-centered young man who glimpses the future and finds it covered in flab.” Chuck Augello on T.C. Boyle’s “Thawing Out.”
“This sounds like a lot. And it is. But van den Berg presents it all with remarkable economy.” Elizabeth Mayer on Laura van den Berg’s “Hill of Hell.” Look for van den Berg’s new collection, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, from FSG in July.
“And though all the violence is ultimately, like most violence, senseless, it is not impossible to understand”: Leigh Camacho Rourks on Tom Franklin’s “Poachers.”
“What exactly did Carver do to make his character’s isolation so palpable that I felt it physically?” Amber Wheeler Bacon on Raymond Carver’s deeply affecting “Are You a Doctor?”
