Maile Meloy in an interview From the Archives: “I think you have to find an emotional connection to the story, to make anyone else care about it, but I would find writing only what I know to be limiting.”
Joshua Bodwell celebrates Black Sparrow Press’s fiftieth anniversary as a trade publisher—with five footnotes, one for each decade.
“The narrator’s voice is earnest and haunted”: Joshua Bodwell on why he loves Andrew Porter’s “River Dog.”
Joshua Bodwell shares about the lasting impact Tom Perrotta’s “The Weiner Man” has made on him.
Patrick Ryan on the pitfalls of penning a period piece, the interesting part of writing villains, and the joys and anxieties of editing Alice Munro and Joy Williams
“…there’s always something more you can take out…”: Jim Nichols with Joshua Bodwell on his influences, Maine, and his new book, Closer All the Time.
“Above all, it must be compelling,” James Salter told the Paris Review in 1993 when asked about his idea of the short story. “You’re sitting around the campfire of literature, so to speak, and various voices speak up out of the dark and begin talking. With some, your mind wanders or you doze off, but with others you are held by every word. The first line, the first sentence, the first paragraph, all have to compel you.” Long before I ever read those remarks by Salter, I’d already come under the influence of his short stories and, in particular, his […]
In February of 2002, I drove north with my pregnant wife from our home in Maine to the distant coast of Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island. The journey took two days. My wife’s family owned a small cottage in the village of Inverness, and the cottage hunkered on a hillside overlooking the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Inverness was a desolate, frozen lunarscape that winter—the wind rushed in off the ocean day and night, Osprey hung in the ashen sky, and the air was thick with salt. The sky and the sea merged into a single cold, gray wall erasing the […]
Richard Ford returns to Montana and heads north to Canada. His seventh novel explores life’s borders.
On June 9, 1992 I turned seventeen years old and my father gave me a single gift: a book that contained a short story that changed my life. The book was Septuagenarian Stew by Charles Bukowski and the short story was the first in the collection: “Son of Satan.” It’s a simple story, really, just six and a half pages long, propelled by curse-riddled dialogue and clipped, action-filled sentences. Classic Bukowski. But unlike many of Buk’s bum and whore populated tales, “Son of Satan” is told by an eleven-year-old narrator. After the narrator and his two friends accuse another boy […]
Stories We Love: “White Angel,” by Michael Cunningham
Stories We Love: Donald Barthelme’s “The School,” In Which is Revealed the Meaning of Life
Stories We Love: "A Small, Good Thing" by Raymond Carver
Stories We Love: "The Fall River Axe Murders," by Angela Carter
Stories We Love: "Incarnations of Burned Children"
