It’s been a busy few weeks at Fiction Writers Review: here’s a roundup of some of our recent features:
- John Madera reviews Leni Zumas’s collection Farewell Navigator:
“There is a seductive element to how these narratives unfold: a slow accretion of details, together with the use of fragmentation, absence, and space, achieves a confluence of associations, connections, and even some kind of understanding.”
- Mary Stewart Atwell reviews Pieces for the Left Hand, by J. Robert Lennon, describing this collection of linked short-short stories as “shar[ing] with the work of [Stuart Dybek and Lydia Davis] an interest in the precise image and the striking moment of characterization,” and adding that “the voice, acerbic, perceptive, and funny, makes every story enjoyable in its own right.”
- Celeste Ng reviews Sonya Chung’s debut novel Long for This World, which “offers the same pleasures—and challenges—of a photography exhibit. Reading, we leapfrog across space and time, from a kitchen in a small South Korean town to a village in Darfur to a gallery in Paris, and we must put together the pieces.”
- Hyphen magazine editor Neelanjana Banerjee interviews Helen Oyeyemi, discussing Oyeyemi’s latest novel, White Is for Witching, issues of biculturality, and stepping away from the “realist narrative.” Says Oyeyemi:
“I find ordinary realist narratives just lacking in something, like realist narratives just aren’t real for me. They don’t make that much sense. Whereas reading stories in which the world suddenly changes, I’m like: ‘Yeah … that makes sense.’ Strange mental states, all that stuff, just seems to be a more – not an honest way – but a more interesting way of describing the world.”
- The latest installment of Steven Wingate’s “Quotes and Notes” series tackles hypnagogia and this quote by Edgar Allen Poe: “Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‘the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.’”
- And don’t miss Jeremy’s tribute to the late Barry Hannah, “Every Line Matters.”
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