Mind the Gap: Narrative Distance in J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man
“But what happens if the author walks into the story and turns up on the page?”: Maggie Kast discusses narrative distance in Coetzee’s Slow Man.
“But what happens if the author walks into the story and turns up on the page?”: Maggie Kast discusses narrative distance in Coetzee’s Slow Man.
In Part IV of Sebastian Matthews’s five-part interview with Julianna Baggott (who also writes as Bridget Asher and N.E. Bode), the two discuss being prolific, writing practice, and working on more than one project at a time.
“By peppering his prose with subtle, sinister details,” Jacob M. Appel argues in this craft essay, “Chaon manages to create a subtext of tension that supports the weight of the story’s content.”
“Fiction that recognizes the different forms power can take more accurately mirrors the complexity of life”: Peter Turchi on how power dynamics can and should inform conflict in fiction.
“So one of my goals was to explore the seemingly perverse pleasure to be had from constraints, or form”: Peter Turchi discusses his new book, A Muse and a Maze with long-time friend Robert Boswell.
“One frustration of writing a single essay about David Jauss’s craft essays and short stories is that every one is worthy of its own in-depth examination.”
The voice Welty created is so entertaining on its own terms that for more than seventy years the political aspects of this story have gone essentially unremarked upon – even undiscovered, at least as far as I can tell.
With some help from his friends, Kevin Haworth explores the complicated and necessary role of desire in fiction.
My close friend Anthony once told me during an e-mail conversation that he considered me the modern-day equivalent of Erma Bombeck. I was offended. I think my actual reply was “WTF?” Anthony was confused. “Erma Bombeck was a great writer,” he typed. “She melded all of this every day experience into something bigger, but she did it by being funny.” “I don’t want to be Erma Bombeck! I want to be Joan Didion!” “You’re not that kind of serious,” he wrote. “Can I be Alice Munro?” It went on like this until he said, “You know, I meant it as […]
Debra Spark on what’s funny in fiction–and what’s not. “The humor that works in literary fiction, the humor I like, is female. I mean ‘female’ in a pretty stereotypical way here. I don’t mean that the literary work is by women per se, but that it is relational.”
