From the Archives: Why do we love Sherlock Holmes? The famed detective nearly sent his creator off the deep end, and has been the object of countless films, odes, debates, letters, and pilgrimages over the past century.
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: “Have you ever heard it said in workshop, ‘What’s at stake for this setting?'”: Ayşe Papatya Bucak with five ideas on how to characterize setting.
From the Archives: The debut novelist talks to Zachary Watterson about writing religions, communities, and landscapes not his own, all with complexity and compassion.
“To love and to express it is to be vulnerable. To create works of art is to be vulnerable, and it’s hard for people to let themselves be vulnerable. Especially in this world, where the internet lets us democratically savage one another, it’s even scarier, but the courage to be an artist means also the courage to love and to express it.” So says Robert Olen Butler in this candid interview with Emily Alford.
“Willie—like all of the characters in A Long Long Way, in fact—is a character constructed primarily through simile”: Patty Keefe Durso on figurative language and characterization in Sebastian Barry’s novel.
What can we learn from Chris Cleve’s interesting but sugary summer read about competing Olympic cyclists? That well-assigned conflicts are what make bestsellers tick.
Lysley Tenorio, author of the hotly-anticipated debut collection Monstress, on secret identity politics, the risk of becoming “that Filipino writer,” lightness and darkness in fiction, and Peter Cetera.
Lauren Groff’s second novel, Arcadia, gorgeously renders a commune’s rise, fall, and life-long resonance for the people who grew up within it. Unfolding as a series of snapshots, the book’s events span the birth of this late-1960s utopia and its central character, Bit Stone, to his middle age in a bleak—and imminent—dystopic future.
Like a hard layer of permafrost, longing and grief lie beneath the surface in Jack Driscoll’s new collection, The World of a Few Minutes Ago. Driscoll’s richly flawed characters toe that fine line between optimism against long odds and outright delusion.
