From the Archives: Unlike the memoirist, who promises to tell the truth, the fiction writer says, “I am going to tell you a lie, but at the end you will feel it is true.” He or she is a kind of magician who makes sure you know the flames are only an illusion before letting you burn your fingers.
From the Archives: as the annual observance of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) approaches this evening, we return to a 2011 essay by Erika Dreifus on the literary kinship among fictional works from an emerging cohort of “3G” (third-generation) Jewish writers: Julie Orringer, Alison Pick, and Natasha Solomons.
From the Archives: Friendship unraveling around exposed ambition – Jacinda Townsend talks with Melissa Scholes Young about competition, solidarity, and the constraints of the wider world.
From the Archives: Mary Stewart Atwell inaugurates a series of interviews with writers of rural fiction, undertaken in partnership with The Art of the Rural, by talking with Jack Driscoll.
Entering a piece of writing in a collaborative way is at the heart of what Fowles called the “I-thou” theory: no matter how many times a book is read, it is fundamentally a relationship—an encounter—between just two people.
From the Archives: “My overall feeling is that it likely took a lot of energy just to keep track of what was going on around me at home—to make sure everyone was okay and the day wasn’t going to veer off into territory that felt fraught and unstable.” Paula Saunders talks with Steven Wingate about her novel The Distance Home and the winner-take-all emotional violence that underpins America.
From the Archives: The award-winning Alexi Zentner on fiction as types of food, pen as talisman, bad music as white noise, and his fellow Canadians, who inspired him to take up the pen.
From the Archives: Here, triangulated between the grit and hardship of necessity, the loneliness of nature and a reverence for it, and the migrations of good and decent hearts—or, at least, hearts that strive in clumsy, sometimes self-defeating ways to be so—through a world that feels cold or, worse, actively hostile to their concerns, Bonnie Jo Campbell has located and renewed the rural ache.
From the Archives: Dzanc Books and 826michigan founder Steven Gillis talks about the “rogue warrior” Renaissance in indie publishing and his new collection, The Law of Strings.
From the Archives: In a Strange Room chronicles Damon’s travels as he journeys from Greece, to various countries in Africa, to India. Traveling, in general, disorients. We are displaced from our normal locations, we are observing places that are not our own, and our minds constantly compare the new, foreign place with the familiar one.
