“The collection, I hope, challenges assumptions about Southeast Michigan, and the people who live here”: Laura Hulthen Thomas chats with Ian Singleton about her debut collection, States of Motion, out today from Wayne State University Press.
“Boy, I hope I’m wrong”: Alexander Weinstein talks with Nina Buckless about consumer culture, virtual reality, and his dystopian debut collection of stories, Children of the New World.
In her debut collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, Danielle Evans’s characters, like most of us, struggle to belong. Their loyalties to place, to family, and to self are often divided. Melissa Scholes Young interviews the author to find out how the identities we claim or deny often define the people we become.
Jennifer Solheim talks with Sam Allingham about his debut collection, The Great American Song Book, as well as the role music played in shaping these stories, borrowed forms, and what it was like to release a book the week after the presidential election.
“Family, loyalty, love, lust: Vanessa Hua does justice to the big themes in this noteworthy debut.”
“This astonishing flip–that human perception is the world’s foundation–comes to the fore again and again in the bright worlds of Cooper’s meditations on care”: Denise Dooley on Desiree Cooper’s debut collection, Know the Mother.
“[A]nd then I see it—the destination. It always rises up out of the dust, closer than I thought it was, and usually as a little bit of a surprise.”
Lynette D’Amico talks with fellow Warren Wilson alumna Lenore Myka about her debut story collection, politics in fiction, the impact writing can have on culture, the costs of creativity, and more.
“William Gass’s ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country’ stands as an answer for what it means to write from the Midwest. Told in thirty-six discrete sections, this story is a devastatingly gorgeous meditation on loss and the rhythms of the Midwestern landscape.
“Whatever happens next, it won’t be a wacky departure for me. I write about gay people and their families and how restless places like Florida suburbs set their inhabitants to dreaming of travel and fame. I write about the South and the literary life.”
