“No matter how well-documented the history of a family home may be, there are gaps… I revel in the license to move into those uncharted spaces; to take a leap of faith from the springboard of memory into the untethered dimension of the imagination.” Ellen Prentiss Campbell on dreams, intuition, and following “the vapor trail of memory” in fiction.
Stuart Dybek is often mentioned in the same breath as Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, Sherwood Andersen—male writers of a certain era who wrote realistic, place-based fiction. And yet when I began reading Dybek, I couldn’t shake the feeing that something different was going on.
James Pinto on André Aciman’s new novel, Harvard Square, “a book about the process of remembering.”
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.
Shortlisted for the Booker, Tan’s novel pits Japanese atrocities in Malaya against an enduring love of their gardens.
We’ve all had the experience of knowing we recorded, somewhere, a great line or perfect image, only to futilely search for it. Could it be that unconsciously we don’t want to recover that perfect line? Because when we finally do come across it, weeks or months later, we discover that the exact phrasing doesn’t fit the story we’re telling or the character we’ve developed. What fits is the approximate version, conjured from the shadows of memory. To be truly “found” or recovered for creative purposes, memory may indeed depend on the process of transmutation.
