“Here’s the thing about writing historical fiction: you’re not trying to reconstruct or mimic history, which would be altogether boring even if it weren’t impossible. What you’re trying to do is to create a new version of it that will tell a good story while simultaneously capturing something essential, not only about the period, but also about contemporary life.”
“I write about these environments for the same reason I’ve put myself in them so many times. It’s a heightened experience. Things are unfamiliar and exciting and you get to redefine yourself, if only briefly.”
Nick Ostdick sits down with Todd Dills to talk about his collection of stories, Triumph of the Ape, the role of setting in his work, using Kickstarter to fund a print-run of his new book, and much more.
What’s a superhero to do when the world doesn’t need him anymore? Neil Connelly, author of The Midlife Crisis of Commander Invincible, has a few answers in this interview.
Alexandra Chasin’s second novel, Brief, takes the form of the oral legal brief of an unnamed and ungendered “J. Wanton,” a “vandella,” petitioning an also unnamed judge for clemency in an elided case of art vandalism.
Any writer who desires to get at the truth of human experience should read poetry, because it contains a multitude of possibility. Poetry is the mud that grows the seed that becomes the forest. It is the clay that makes the brick that forms the building. It is the blood that moves the body that holds the spirit. Poetry has the essence of life in it. Poets voice that which has no voice in this world. They speak in tongues, and hope their words reach the ears and touch the hearts of those who know what it means to live. […]
Our current feature is William Gillespie’s new novel, Keyhole Factory, which was just published by Soft Skull Press. Gillespie is the author of several small-press books, an award-winning hypertext novel, and the world’s longest literary palindrome. He was granted an MFA from Brown, where he received one of the first MFAs in Electronic Writing. His work has appeared in American Book Review, Context, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and the &Now Award Anthology. He is also the founder of Spineless Books, an innovative literary press “with an emphasis on collaborative writing, formal experimentation, and utopian thought.” Gillespie lives in Urbana, […]
Our current feature is Steven Schwartz”s newest collection, Little Raw Souls, which was published last week by Pittsburgh-based indie press Autumn House. Schwartz teaches in the residential MFA program at Colorado State University and the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. Recently, he has become fiction editor at Colorado Review. He is the author of two story collections, To Leningrad in Winter (University of Missouri) and Lives of the Fathers (University of Illinois), and two novels, Therapy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and A Good Doctor’s Son (William Morrow). His fiction has received the Nelson Algren Award, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, […]
Anne Panning talks to Melissa Scholes Young about her debut novel, her writing process, the benefits of social media, and the advantages of working with a small press.
Peter Stamm’s collected stories in translation contain brutal—and beautiful—truths.
