From the Archives: What do the 2011 Japanese Tsunami, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and one family’s personal heartbreak have in common? For Ellen Prentiss Campbell, the answer lies in Pearl S. Buck’s 1948 young adult novel, The Big Wave, and the individual acts of creative defiance that help survivors not only carry on, but value life’s beauty more highly because they know it will not last.
“I read and I write to explore lives I haven’t lived. To encounter different lives, responses, experiences. Historical fiction can be something like the illumination of starlight, reaching us, seemingly alive and bright, years after.”
Dorothy Reno talks to Ellen Prentiss Campbell about her new novel, Frieda’s Song, which imagines the private life of eminent German American psychotherapist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and explores her legacy in the therapeutic community.
“The rubble of what happens is the real souvenir in these stories: memento mori, reminder not just of time gone by, but of death, always there, always approaching.” Ellen Prentiss Campbell on Elizabeth McCracken’s new collection, The Souvenir Museum.
Ellen Prentiss Campbell meditates on the influence of teachers, fulfilling promises, and becoming who we’re meant to be in this homage to her teacher Sally Nash.
“Reading these stories at times feels almost like complicit voyeurism—witnessing pain through a one-way mirror in the laboratory of Nors’s world.” Ellen Prentiss Campbell reviews Dorthe Nors’s new collection, Wild Swims, out tomorrow from Graywolf.
“I wanted to understand why we do the same bad things over and over.” Ellen Prentiss Campbell interviews Ginger Eager about her debut novel, The Nature of Remains, out now from New Issues.
“The novel is narrated as an episodic composite, linked by the author’s narrative conceit: a persistent Argentinian journalist has been seeking to interview elusive, reclusive Watanabe.” Ellen Prentiss Cambell reviews Fracture, by Andrés Neuman.
“I think that the ‘stakes’ in my stories come out of those struggles, internal or between people, which become moments of decision.” Ellen Prentisss Campbell talks with Josh Barkan about her new story collection, Known By Heart.
“Nesbit’s empathy is as evident and important here as her commitment to accuracy”: Ellen Prentiss Campbell on TaraShea Nesbit’s new novel, Beheld.
