Among the Living, by Jonathan Rabb
“One of the challenges of an historical novel is to use a major political event to illuminate character rather than as a ‘deus ex machina'”: Sophie Cook on Jonathan Rabb’s new novel.
“One of the challenges of an historical novel is to use a major political event to illuminate character rather than as a ‘deus ex machina'”: Sophie Cook on Jonathan Rabb’s new novel.
“The novel’s primary storyline begins approximately where Mawer’s last novel, Trapeze (Other Press, 2012), left off. Marian, who in Trapeze parachuted into occupied France as an undercover agent, is now returning to England at the end of World War II.”
Jennifer Solheim on Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation: “Through Harun, Daoud explores both the ethics of Camus creating a nameless Arab character to kill on the beach as part of a philosophical exploration, and the horror of a pied noir being canonized for killing an Arab.”
“Along the way, listening to writers at my dinner table speak of their work, their contracts, their advances, their sales, their ratings on Amazon, their competitors, etc, I came to realize how much it takes to carve out a career as an author, to live by the pen. At my present age, none of these concerns are mine.” Elena Delbacno discusses the perks of publishing later in life.
Chris Cander talks shop about her creative process and the story origins of her latest novel.
This week’s feature is Elizabeth Cohen’s story collection The Hypothetical Girl, which was published by Other Press. Cohen is the author of The Family on Beartown Road: A Memoir of Love and Courage (Random House, 2004), which chronicles Cohen’s life raising her young daughter and taking care of her father as he struggles with Alzheimer’s disease. It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is also the author of numerous collections of poetry, including What the Trees Said (2013) and The Economist’s Daughter (2011). She is an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Plattsburgh and she […]
Jeremiah Chamberlin on three new novels in translation from the French: Where Tigers Are at Home, Blue White Red, and Cruel City.
Popular Argentinian writer Eduardo Sacheri has said that “writing is a special way to read.” In this review of The Secret in Their Eyes, Denise Delgado explores the similarities and differences between Sacheri’s first novel and the Academy-Award winning film adaptation he helped write.
Every work of fiction is grown from at least one seed of truth, whether it’s an emotional truth, an actual event, or a fact of nature. For Michelle Hoover, author of the elegant debut novel The Quickening, this seed was a fifteen-page document that her great-grandmother typed out in the final year of her life. In it, “broken hearted and sick in mind and body,” she recounted her seven decades as an Iowa farmwoman. Loosely based on this document and family oral histories, The Quickening follows the journeys of two Iowan families trying to build their lives amid the hardships of the Great Depression.
