“Zambreno’s explicit referencing of not just film tropes in general, but Noh theater and French cinema and American plays in particular, immediately raises questions about agency, artifice, and images of women. And in the reflective process that follows, a reader might naturally find themselves asking: who is the director of our lives?”
Eleanor J. Bader calls Lynn Kanter’s third novel, Her Own Vietnam, “a cogent rebuttal to politicians who wax poetic about the glory and honor of war and militarism.”
Nichole Bernier talks to E.B. Moore about publishing her debut novel at 72: “The Amish life is exotic to behold and comforting, a little like going to a habitat zoo to watch the slow march of elephants cropping grass with their trunks and blowing dust over their backs.”
“Even though recent history might seem to have betrayed Bezmozgis’ intentions, what’s important in The Betrayers are the people who live, toil, and suffer in Crimea and Israel-Palestine.”
“While one can’t learn the ineffables of writing from the page or a person—voice, innate talent, insightful narrative—one can gain skill sets and learn tools. Like architecture or painting, one’s concept and talent requires more than paper and pen.”
“For me, the perspective shift is one of the great powers and pleasures of writing fiction,” says Katherine Hill in conversation with Melissa Scholes Young. “Not that I’d be bored with one perspective—well, all right, I might be bored—but I think I’m just incredibly interested in people’s reactions to each other, both conscious and unconscious.”
“The Symmetry Teacher and its Russian version have a different relationship than the traditional one of a translation to an original. The additions and augmentations alone suggest this. The Symmetry Teacher is a bilingual or interlingual novel. Perhaps translingual is the term for it, since the novel refers back to its previous versions.”
“True love with a cost may be Pete Fromm’s calling card,” writes Heidi Willis in the review of this new novel, “his stories peppered with characters who inhabit broken places.”
“In Forest of Fortune, Ruland combines the tropes of hardboiled crime fiction with the creepy appeal of a ghost story, and riffs on elements from addiction/recovery narratives.”
“I wish I were one of those people with very set routines, lovely offices, fresh flowers, yoga poses, no Internet, and so on. But I’m not. I’m the queen of clutter and chaos”: Robin Black talks with Nichole Bernier about hipness, success, and her new novel, Life Drawing.
