What We Talk About When We Talk About What We Miss
by Joshua Bodwell
From the Archives: On our delayed discovery of Lucia Berlin and what we miss when we miss independent presses.
From the Archives: On our delayed discovery of Lucia Berlin and what we miss when we miss independent presses.
From the Archives: “Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Welcome Home alongside a new collection of Lucia Berlin’s short stories, Evening in Paradise, on the same day as the midterm elections last week. A knowing wink from the publisher to the politics that these books contain? Perhaps.”
From the Archives: After waiting impatiently for Daniel Orozco’s debut story collection, J.T. Bushnell finds that it exceeds all expectations. Bushnell calls these stories “full of satire and absurdity and insight.”
From the Archives: “Clarity can be reached via winding paths, and the reading experience may be all the richer for the wandering”: Christina Ward-Niven wraps up her essay on defamiliarization with a discussion of Gina Berriault’s surprising language.
From the Archives: “The unexpected can actually move the reader from an automated kind of knowledge to a more complex kind of knowledge”: Christina Ward-Niven on point of view and characterization in Eudora Welty.
From the Archives: “By allowing strangeness into our familiar landscapes, we can surprise the reader into pausing, paying attention, and possibly recognizing some kind of familiar human truth in a new, illuminating way”: Christina Ward-Niven on odd narrative events in Chekhov.
From the Archives: Emily McLaughlin converses and laughs with author Mary Gaitskill, a fellow University of Michigan alum, on her visit to Ann Arbor. Gaitskill opens up about writing as a woman in 2011, her take on her own characters, writing sex, publishing her first stories, and lasting fifty years.
From the Archives: By astutely balancing the physical with the psychological, Elizabeth Graver manages to produce what Jacob M. Appel calls “four-dimensional stories.”
From the Archives: Christopher Mohar talks with Anthony Doerr about the politics of writing, the importance of curiosity, the role science plays in his fiction, why he likes the novella as a form, and how we can successfully inhabit characters different from ourselves.
From the Archives: “But for me that liminal quality, neither one thing nor the other, is exactly the point”: Peter Ho Davies with Eric McDowell on writerly patience, all manner of hybridity, and his novel The Fortunes.
