Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘essay’

Essays |

In a Shared Voice: The Wives of Los Alamos and The Buddha in The Attic

“. . .these two groups of women are indeed sisters under the skin, and these authors are sisters as well.” Ellen Prentiss Campbell on connecting Nesbit and Otsuka through their use of first-person plural.


Essays |

Present Everywhere, Visible Nowhere: Flaubert’s Eye for Detail

“What a bitch of a thing prose is!” Gustave Flaubert wrote in a letter to his lover Louise Colet in 1852. “It’s never finished; there’s always something to redo. Yet I think one can give it the consistency of verse. A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.” In this essay, contributing editor Travis Holland meditates on Flaubert’s influence and legacy in fiction.


Essays |

Creative Defiance

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.


Essays |

The 2011 Sozopol Fiction Seminar: Part II

Step two: engage. Sozopol coverage continues with Molly Antopol’s conversation with Bulgarian author Miroslav Penkov and Lee Kaplan Romer’s meditation on writing as an act of defiance and grace.


Essays |

The 2011 Sozopol Fiction Seminar: Part I

Step One: Leave home. Three fellows from the Sozopol Fiction Seminar consider questions of travel, culture, and translation. Part I: John Struloeff on international diplomacy and collaboration, Jane E. Martin on finding home abroad, and Michael Hinken on how we rediscover home by leaving it. Later this week: Molly Antopol and Lee Romer Kaplan.


Essays |

DFW + Me = An ‘Arranged’ Marriage of Music and Fiction

What happens when a composer falls in love with a David Foster Wallace short story? Eric Moe describes the genesis of his “sit-trag /concert monodrama” Tri-Stan, his correspondence with DFW about the project, the challenges of translating a short story to a one-woman vocal piece, and why “making art is a lot more exciting when big risks are being taken.”