From the Archives: The award-winning Alexi Zentner on fiction as types of food, pen as talisman, bad music as white noise, and his fellow Canadians, who inspired him to take up the pen.
I was lucky enough to attend on behalf of FWR, and the evening was pretty magical—the-Oscars-meets-Inside-the-Actors-Studio of short-story collections.
In her latest collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Knopf), Russell traffics in her now-trademark wit. In eight tightly drawn stories, she imagines fantastical worlds that stem from the bleakest realities.
Emma Straub’s first novel is a paen to old Hollywood–both its heroines and its illusions.
As a fiction writer, I have a litmus test for knowing if a book is one I love love love versus one that is merely admirable. A book that is truly fantastic for me is one that also makes me want to write. It’s not that I go into the reading experience looking to be bitten by contagious writing. But I’ve found that when I read certain writers—Jennifer Egan, Jo Ann Beard, Susan Minot, to name a few—the reverie of their prose is so intense, so real, that I find myself wanting to continue the conversation on my side of […]
In his powerful debut novel, The Art of Fielding, N+1 co-founder/editor Chad Harbach taps into the ephemeral baseball consciousness through a four-person starting rotation of narrators—all characters at a small, fictional, liberal arts school on Lake Michigan.
In her sixth novel, State of Wonder, Ann Patchett delivers an adventure story that still rests comfortably on the shelf of Literary Fiction. Researcher Marina Singh leaves her Minnesota lab for the Amazon to investigate a coworker’s death and evaluate the research of a field team deep in the jungle.
The appeal of Jo Ann Beard’s coming-of-age novel In Zanesville transcends both age and gender.
This is a little revision device I’ve whipped up to try to tell if a paragraph or page or section is too soft or vulnerable, if it needs to be edited out. Or if it’s too autobiographical in a way that could lead to questioning from my grandmother’s bridge club. You know how, after you’ve sent a risky email–maybe to someone you’re desperately in love with, or to your boss, or to a professor to lay into him a little bit when you aren’t really allowed to do that–there’s this feeling you get that maybe you should have waited until […]
In her first novel, Swamplandia! (Knopf, 2011), acclaimed short story writer Karen Russell (St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves) renders a highly specific shoebox-world of wonder and mystery. Set in the Florida swamps, largely within a fictional alligator theme park, the sun rises and sets with her lush yet economical descriptions and poignant characterizations of the 14-year-old protagonist, Ava, and her rapidly dissolving family.
