Stories We Love: “The Bees,” by Dan Chaon
by Shawn Andrew Mitchell
“‘The Bees’ is one hundred percent, additive-free parental nightmare fuel, from the inexplicable screams to the accidental and intentional harms to the final body bags.”
“‘The Bees’ is one hundred percent, additive-free parental nightmare fuel, from the inexplicable screams to the accidental and intentional harms to the final body bags.”
“I’m very much a second draft person”: Dan Chaon and Amy Gustine talk structure, process, and Chaon’s new novel, Ill Will.
“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.”
“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.”
The uncanny controls the palette in Stay Awake, a short-story collection showcasing a writer in mid-career who is not simply at the top of his game, but who refuses to settle.
“I’ve always felt personally and emotionally closer to the searchers, rather than to the finders…to those who don’t get answers, as opposed to those who do. For me, the experience of epiclitus is closely related to the experience of the uncanny, but also to the experience of complex and problematic emotions, like yearning, and awe, and psychic unease, which are of particular interest to me. That precipice of endless uncertainty, of the impenetrable—those are the moments that I’ve always loved in literature, as well as the moments that have haunted me in life.”
