Steve Wingate sits down with Gary Schanbacher to discuss his debut novel, Crossing Purgatory, and the challenges of writing historical literary fiction about a time and place that has inspired so much pulp: the 19th century American West.
Kathleen Tessaro’s fifth novel, The Perfume Collector, invites the reader into a fashionable world where scent and apparel wield transformative magic.
Richard Bausch once said, “Bad politics hurt human beings and good writers report that damage.” Ru Freeman agrees. In this interview with fellow author Tania James, Freeman talks about her new novel, On Sal Mal Lane, the early influence of words, and where history and story intersect.
In 2009, Narrative Magazine published Anthony Marra’s short story “Chechnya.” He was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop then and “Chechnya” was his first published story. It won a Pushcart Prize before Marra expanded it into his first published novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, released this week by Hogarth. Lauded by Ann Patchett for being the most “ambitious and fully realized” first novel since Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena connects the lives of six characters surviving the dense hellscape of war-torn Chechnya, 1994-2004. I finished the novel two days before last […]
Croatian writer Robert Perisic talks with Steven Wingate about his latest novel Our Man in Iraq, the modern global economy and its relationship to developing nations, and the slide between journalism and fiction writing.
This week’s feature is Urban Waite’s new novel, The Carrion Birds, which was published last week by William Morrow. Urban Waite is the author of The Terror of Living, named one of Esquire‘s Ten Best Books of 2011. His short fiction has appeared in the Best of the West 2009 anthology, the Southern Review, and other journals. He has degrees from the University of Washington, Western Washington University, and Emerson College. He lives in Seattle with his wife. In 2011 we were pleased to feature Cam Terwilliger’s previous interview with Waite, which corresponded with the publication of The Terror of […]
Marriage as ethnography: Philip Graham talks with Angela Woodward about her novel End of the Fire Cult, in which a man and woman invent competing civilizations that mirror their “real” lives.
“Where You Can Find Me doesn’t explain the unexplainable, but instead opens us to a complicated world of pain and love and mystery, a world that we both know and can never know.”
Louisa Hall’s debut novel, The Carriage House, works through the tensions children face in a family that values tradition over individual autonomy, while speaking to the dilemma of writing from—and reading about—the perspective of characters who are privileged.
“Nostalgia, of course, is the most powerful form of lust: portable as your memories, infinitely rechargeable, and impossible to slake.” Dan Keane reviews James Salter’s new novel, All That Is.
