FWR editor Eric McDowell and Barrett Bowlin sit down to talk small presses, the fiction of shitty jobs, and Bowlin’s debut collection, Ghosts Caught on Film, winner of the Bridge Eight Press Fiction Prize.
Barrett Bowlin on Deesha Philyaw’s “Eula” as a sales pitch to students for “why it’s so good and important and essential to read short stories overall.”
“I don’t feel compromised by the genre.” Jennifer Pashley talks with Barrett Bowlin about her first thriller, The Watcher, out now from Crooked Lane Books.
“That’s how Chapter 11 became Chapter 1.” Barrett Bowlin and David James Poissant talk short stories vs. novels, comic books, the pandemic, and Poissant’s new novel, Lake Life, out next week from Simon & Schuster.
“Homes delivers exactly on her narrator’s opening promise”: Barrett Bowlin on A.M. Homes’s cult classic short story “A Real Doll.”
“I get worried each time I see a review that talks about just how angry the stories are—well, yeah, but they’re also really funny.” Amber Sparks chats with Barrett Bowlin about her new collection of stories, And I Do Not Forgive You, out tomorrow from Liveright.
“I don’t ever really think a work is done, but I’m excited when a work is doing something, anything further.” Kristen Arnett chats with Barrett Bowlin about representing queerness, Florida writers, and drafting her debut novel, Mostly Dead Things, out this week from Tin House books.
“Whenever I have 20–30 minutes free, I’m writing”: Keith Lesmeister chats with Barrett Bowlin about his debut collection, We Could’ve Been Happy Here, out this month from Midwestern Gothic Press.
“I hope to make a statement on rural people’s lives and how they’ve suffered under the loss of manufacturing in rural America”: Jaimee Wriston Colbert chats with Barrett Bowlin about her new collection, Wild Things (BkMk Press).
“Maybe all the books I read in childhood about faraway places helped to shape that part of my imaginative engine; I don’t know.”
