Hard-earned art: For the last decade, Julia Fierro has been teaching writers, organizing readings and workshops, raising a family, and writing hundreds of pages of half-novels– and then throwing them away. Now she debuts Cutting Teeth.
“I have never castrated a calf or repaired a fence”: Eric Shonkwiler talks to Brian Ted Jones about writing Above All Men, his debut novel set in a near-future, mid-apocalypse America.
The best stories channel all the variety of their subject matter to the same place. They use it to worm into those mysterious depths that underlie human experience, those facets of existence we can each recognize despite the different lives we lead—connection, compassion, loyalty, betrayal, loss, failure.
Virginia Pye’s debut novel, River of Dust (Unbridled Books), was an Indie Next Pick for May 2013. Carolyn See, in the Washington Post, called it “mysterious, exotic, creepy—everything ignorant foreigners used to believe China to be.” And in his blurb, Robert Olen Butler hailed the novel as “a major book by a splendid writer.” River of Dust is a gripping historical adventure, set in rural China in 1910, which opens with a parent’s worst fear: kidnapping. The book is also a lyrical psychological and spiritual meditation, as the search for the American missionary couple’s stolen son becomes nothing less than a search for “the […]
The optimism and nostalgia we sometimes associate with a certain narrative of American immigration—the golden door—are banished by these writers’ sharp, sober observations.
Paul Lynch’s debut novel, Red Sky in Morning, reads like the love child of a painter and a poet. Lynch uses dense, rhythmically mesmerizing and sometimes obscure language that begs us to pause and linger over each phrase.
Paul Lynch’s debut novel, Red Sky in Morning, reads like the love child of a painter and a poet. Lynch uses dense, rhythmically mesmerizing and sometimes obscure language that begs us to pause and linger over each phrase.
Alex Shakespeare talks with William Boyle about his first novel, Gravesend, which releases this month, as well as leaving a place to write about it, crime as character study, and what we get from novels that we can’t find in other art forms.
JT Torres talks with Don Reardon about his debut novel, The Raven’s Gift, and how “survival” impacts his philosophy of teaching, writing, and life, as well as what it means to write Alaska today.
It wasn’t until Peter Anderson began commuting by train from Joliet for his job in the heart of Chicago’s downtown financial district that he unearthed perhaps the most valuable aspect for any fiction writer: time. Nick Ostdick speaks with Anderson about his debut novel, Wheatyard, and how he turned his scribblings during his daily commute into the beginnings of a literary career.
