From the Archives: “My overall feeling is that it likely took a lot of energy just to keep track of what was going on around me at home—to make sure everyone was okay and the day wasn’t going to veer off into territory that felt fraught and unstable.” Paula Saunders talks with Steven Wingate about her novel The Distance Home and the winner-take-all emotional violence that underpins America.
From the Archives: Travis Holland talks with fiction master Tobias Wolff about the pleasures and anxieties of influence, the changing societal role of writer-celebrities, and the reasons Wolff has “always been attracted to the incisiveness, velocity, exactitude, precision of the short story.”
From the Archives: “By allowing the reader to hear these voices, their pravda, instead of her own, Alexievich can better give voice to the feelings of disenfranchisement many witnesses feel in the current, capitalist Russia.”
From the Archives: “So the story was an experiment in that way too. I put a lot more of my own life in it”: Kelly Link talks with Alice Sola Kim about her new collection, Get In Trouble, and more.
“Olive, Again is in some ways—but not all—a surprising sort of sequel, just as Olive Kitteridge is a continually surprising person: blunt and gruff, but increasingly capable of both insight and empathy.”
“Lucy’s the disturbing stone thrown into a still, dark pond”: Ellen Prentiss Campbell on Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, Anything Is Possible.
“I’m very much a second draft person”: Dan Chaon and Amy Gustine talk structure, process, and Chaon’s new novel, Ill Will.
“Should we fear these women or sympathize with them, or—somehow—manage to do both?”: Mary Stewart Atwell reviews Emma Cline’s debut novel, The Girls, out this month from Random House.
“By mid-career, Richard Russo, always a spellbinding natural storyteller, had written and read his way (he is a voracious reader) to a technical mastery enabling him to create, in his small towns, complete artistic universes.”
“There’s also story-telling magic at work in this incantatory book; it sparks resonant memories of stories heard and internalized: once-upon-a-time-stories, fables, fairy tales, and myths, as well as those from Shakespeare and the Bible.”
