“I have never encountered prose that renders this world so beautifully: the field ceases to be a language and series of figures we don’t understand and becomes a subject for which we have a nearly physical understanding.”
“Each story is a kind of on-the-job training”: Bret Anthony Johnston talks with Sarah Anne Johnson about his debut novel, Remember Me Like This.
“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.
The British are Coming: Quercus Books arrives on US shores, debuting with Pierre Lemaitre’s Alex, a gripping and extremely intelligent thriller that will fully engage, mercilessly shock, and unexpectedly surprise its readers from its first page to its last.
The British are Coming: Quercus Books arrives on US shores, debuting with Pierre Lemaitre’s Alex, a gripping and extremely intelligent thriller that will fully engage, mercilessly shock, and unexpectedly surprise its readers from its first page to its last.
The Song is You, by Arthur Phillips, is a book about music and love – the grand, sweeping stuff. So you might be surprised at how controlled the writing is. Not that I was expecting the book to play a cloying tune when I opened it, like one of those oversized Hallmark cards, but I did somehow expect it to be more… well, musical. The 2006 movie Once is an example – one I thought of often while reading this – of how music can surge viscerally through a love story and vice versa, though of course a film has certain advantages in evoking song that a book does not.
Congratulations to Elizabeth Strout, whose Olive Kitteridge, a collection of linked stories (billed as a “novel in stories”) about a curmudgeonly retired schoolteacher in Maine, has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Finalists included Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves and Christine Schutt’s All Souls. You can read an excerpt from Olive Kitteridge here and the NY Times review here.
In this masterful debut novel, Hannah Tinti beguiles without the slightest trace of the maudlin. Readers will fall in love with Ren, a one-handed orphan boy who works for grave-robbers and longs for a family, and with North Umbrage–a 19th-century New England town where widows press their ears to the earth to listen for their husbands, trapped long ago in a mine collapse.
Warm congratulations to Hannah Tinti! Check out the story here. Bonus: Hannah is guest-teaching my fiction workshop tomorrow. As a longtime fan of her work (and a One Story subscriber) I am thrilled to formally meet her and introduce her to my students. And a review of the dazzling The Good Thief is forthcoming (this weekend or next week) on FWR.
Congratulations to Peter Matthiessen, whose novel Shadow Country just captured the 2008 NBA in Fiction. In this interview (conducted after his book was named a finalist), Mattheissen describes his writing process and shares why he thinks fiction matters. Interviewer Bret Anthony Johnston asked the author what the “engine” behind his novel was: BAJ: For some writers, the engine that powers their fiction is character. For others, it’s language. For others still, the engine might loosely be called “theme.” Do you identify with any of those? What sparked the initial idea for you? PM: Very important as those are, the seed […]
