“I think it takes a greater creative leap to attempt to throw yourself into a stranger and try to make sense of him or her in a way that often makes sense of yourself too”: Michelle Hoover and Allison Amend discuss their latest novels and the difficulties of writing fiction based on historical fact.
“Amend does a remarkable job making Frances’s story feels less like a novel and more like a real life”: Tyler McMahon on Allison Amend’s new novel, Enchanted Islands.
This week’s feature is Allison Amend’s new novel, A Nearly Perfect Copy, which was recently published by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday. Amend, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is the author of the Independent Publisher Book Award-winning short story collection Things That Pass for Love and the novel Stations West, which was a finalist for the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Oklahoma Book Award. Her new novel, A Nearly Perfect Copy, was published in April. She lives in New York City, where she teaches creative writing at Lehman College and at the Red Earth […]
What is The Glister? To my dismay as a reviewer but my delight as a reader, John Burnside’s seventh novel defies encapsulation. The title itself suggests the book’s strangeness: the word, a synonym of “glitter,” seems composed of equal parts “glisten” and “blister.” In the way it compounds beauty and ugliness, it is a microcosm of the book as a whole. The Glister is neither a straightforward horror story nor an allegory à la Animal Farm, though at times it masquerades as both.
