Stories We Love: “The Bees,” by Dan Chaon
by Shawn Andrew Mitchell
“‘The Bees’ is one hundred percent, additive-free parental nightmare fuel, from the inexplicable screams to the accidental and intentional harms to the final body bags.”
“‘The Bees’ is one hundred percent, additive-free parental nightmare fuel, from the inexplicable screams to the accidental and intentional harms to the final body bags.”
“The horror of the residency is not that one can’t leave; it’s that one doesn’t have to”: Nora Kipnis on Carmen Maria Machado’s version of the cabin in the woods.
“Quietly brutal, at times hallucinatory, and laced with emotional trap doors and secret passages, The Illness Lesson vibrates with a slow burning fury”: Emily Nagin reviews Clare Beams’ debut novel.
“I hope to make a statement on rural people’s lives and how they’ve suffered under the loss of manufacturing in rural America”: Jaimee Wriston Colbert chats with Barrett Bowlin about her new collection, Wild Things (BkMk Press).
A bookish fifteen-year-old breaches taboos in the small New England town of Wick. Poet Rebecca Wolff’s masterful first novel is an Appalachian folk ballad rendered gothic–full of sex and ghosts, mixing caution and temptation, obsessed with origins but somehow timeless.
Erzsebet Bathory gained immortal fame as one of the first female serial killers; known as the “Bloody Countess,” she was accused of brutally torturing and murdering over six-hundred young women. But was she really an unrepentant, psychopathic murderer—or simply a political obstacle to the king? Was she really bathing in the blood of her victims, or was she herself the victim of a witch hunt? Such questions haunt the pages of The Countess (Crown, 2010), Rebecca Johns’s lively historical novel, which reconstructs the complexity of this 17th century scandal and brings alive the woman behind the myth.
