Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘how fiction works’

Interviews |

Prayer, Inquiry, Memory: An Interview with Anthony Doerr

From the Archives: Christopher Mohar talks with Anthony Doerr about the politics of writing, the importance of curiosity, the role science plays in his fiction, why he likes the novella as a form, and how we can successfully inhabit characters different from ourselves.


Interviews |

Fuck Sentimentality: An Interview with Robert Olen Butler

“To love and to express it is to be vulnerable. To create works of art is to be vulnerable, and it’s hard for people to let themselves be vulnerable. Especially in this world, where the internet lets us democratically savage one another, it’s even scarier, but the courage to be an artist means also the courage to love and to express it.” So says Robert Olen Butler in this candid interview with Emily Alford.


Interviews |

Fuck Sentimentality: An Interview with Robert Olen Butler

“To love and to express it is to be vulnerable. To create works of art is to be vulnerable, and it’s hard for people to let themselves be vulnerable. Especially in this world, where the internet lets us democratically savage one another, it’s even scarier, but the courage to be an artist means also the courage to love and to express it.” So says Robert Olen Butler in this candid interview with Emily Alford.


Interviews |

Eager to Hear Voices Ringing Off The Page: An Interview with Joan Leegant

At age 53, Joan Leegant published her first book, the critically heralded story collection, An Hour in Paradise. With her debut novel, Wherever You Go, she has continued to prove her presence as a preeminent Jewish-American writer. Jody Lisberger taught fiction at Harvard with Joan Leegant, and their interview explores questions of structure, identity, listening to your characters and the treatment of ethical issues in fiction.


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.


Interviews |

The Man and the Making: An Interview with Bruce Machart

“Thunderstruck,” Aaron Cance describes his reading of Bruce Machart’s two debut books: a novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, and a story collection, Men in the Making, out this week. They also discuss the themes of faith, masculinity, and love, and how a New England basement is a helpful metaphor for writing.