Rebecca Scherm on using charts while working on her debut novel, Unbecoming: “It helps me remember how messy this process was, how difficult. I need to see the record of that mess to believe that I can do this again.”
“Each story is a kind of on-the-job training”: Bret Anthony Johnston talks with Sarah Anne Johnson about his debut novel, Remember Me Like This.
“I’ve been a high school English teacher for ten years, and I think being surrounded by kids all day has helped me to remember what it’s like to be young. I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to those years, but I still think it’s such a cool age. When you’re fifteen, everything is new and fresh; so much life happens.”
“Here’s the thing about writing historical fiction: you’re not trying to reconstruct or mimic history, which would be altogether boring even if it weren’t impossible. What you’re trying to do is to create a new version of it that will tell a good story while simultaneously capturing something essential, not only about the period, but also about contemporary life.”
“I usually feel like an aesthete, just trying to write decent sentences. But with this book I was aware of being a white guy consciously setting out to write about race and about certain feelings buried in white people and I wouldn’t be much of a writer if I was going to go into all of that and come out the other side having given it a trivial treatment and being okay with that.”
“I felt like I needed a way to stay curious with the material”: Brittani Sonnenberg chats with Danielle Lazarin about Home Leave, her new novel.
“This willingness to myth-bust is critical to the continuing maturation of books set in the American West,” writes contributor Laura Pritchett in her review of The Home Place. “La Seur is elegant and graceful and quiet in her approach, but she succeeds.”
“The Devil in the Marshalsea is anything but a quaint period piece, a costume drama in prose. There are a few well-stuffed, beribboned bodices, but this novel is a grim tale of an eighteenth-century crime (owing money) and punishment (prison for same).”
“It’s an exciting book, full of high-stakes drag races, dangerous driving, crimes and betrayals, and gut-wrenching close calls, all rendered with Harrison’s literary sensibilities.”
“Like its predecessors, Beautiful Soul appears postmodern in its aesthetics and innovations in that it leverages devices common to the Nouveau Roman and Experimental Novel.”
