The Mystery of Fiction: An Interview with Ana Menendez
by Melissa Scholes Young
From the Archives: Ana Menéndez’s story collection Adios, Happy Homeland! shadows people on the run from their circumstances and themselves.
From the Archives: Ana Menéndez’s story collection Adios, Happy Homeland! shadows people on the run from their circumstances and themselves.
“Ethnographic fiction, and all fiction in general, depends on Kierkegaardian leaps of imaginative faith, which is not the same thing as an ‘anything goes’ world in which facts don’t matter.” JT Torres on variation and verisimilitude.
“They were various versions of American realism, reflections of an American writing style that felt to me like a costume”: Derek Palacio chats with Gabriel Urza about The Mortifications, his new novel.
Melissa Scholes Young sits down with Jennine Capó Crucet again, this time to discuss the author’s debut novel, as well as the role humor plays in fiction, finding your material, and being asked the “Where Are You From From?” question.
“When you live in a nation that has been politically destabilized by outside forces, anything is possible. I know what it’s like firsthand for a government to fall, for a system to collapse. If you’ve lived in a society where that has happened, there is nothing ‘magical’ about that ‘realism”: Elizabeth Huergo talks with Melissa Scholes Young about her debut novel, The Death of Fidel Pérez.
When The Clash asked the question “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” Jennine Capó Crucet had an answer. In How to Leave Hialeah, Crucet’s debut short story collection, characters wrestle with how the places they’re from shape their identity, how to grow beyond them, and why leaving is sometimes the only answer.
