“More than anything, I wanted this book to take on the processed food industry. As a satirist, I wanted my novel to serve as a kind of corrective to it, if only by asking readers to question what it is they’re eating. But the food industry doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so it’s what it reveals about American life that is really at the center of the novel.”
Paul Lynch’s debut novel, Red Sky in Morning, reads like the love child of a painter and a poet. Lynch uses dense, rhythmically mesmerizing and sometimes obscure language that begs us to pause and linger over each phrase.
Paul Lynch’s debut novel, Red Sky in Morning, reads like the love child of a painter and a poet. Lynch uses dense, rhythmically mesmerizing and sometimes obscure language that begs us to pause and linger over each phrase.
Samuel Sattin’s debut novel League of Somebodies follows Lenard Sikophsky, whose father has been feeding him plutonium since infancy in order to make him into a real-life superhero. Author Sean Beaudoin sits down with Sattin to talk with him about his book, the progressivism of comic books, early comic influences, origin stories, and more.
This week’s feature is NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names, which was just published by Reagan Arthur Books. Bulawayo’s stories have won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing and were shortlisted for the 2009 SA PEN Studzinsi Award, judged by J.M. Coetzee. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, she earned her MFA at Cornell University, where she was a recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship, and, most recently, a lecturer of English. Bulawayo is now a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. In the introduction to Rebecca Scherm’s review of We Need New Names, she writes: NoViolet Bulawayo’s […]
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.
The appeal of Jo Ann Beard’s coming-of-age novel In Zanesville transcends both age and gender.
“Now he was the one smiling. He knew they were all around the table, he could feel their eyes on him—The One With The Flat Face, The One With The Big Ones, The One With The Worried Face, The Gringo With The Ugly Finger, The One With The White Pants, The One With The Net On His Head—staring at him and waiting for his next move.” There is so much more to Don Fidencio Rosales, the ninety-one year-old protagonist of Oscar Casares’s comedic and heartening first novel, Amigoland (Little, Brown 2009), than simply his age. First and foremost, there’s his […]
FWR contributor Jeremiah Chamberlin has an interview in Granta with my dear friend and former MI classmate Uwem Akpan. Uwem, who is also a Jesuit priest and a teacher, saw his first story collection, the remarkable Say You’re One of Them, published by Little, Brown in May. In this conversation with Jeremy, he discusses why fiction is his genre of choice, what challenges he faced (and faces) in creating stories true to the children and regions they depict, what fascinates and “puzzles” him as a writer, and how writing can be a calling: My goal is to get the reader […]
In his second novel, Zachary Lazar captures the shadow lurking just on the other side of Woodstock; Sway delivers a fresh and haunting take on cultural icons like Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Kenneth Anger, Bobby Beausoleil, and Charles Manson–and on the era they helped characterize.
