We Need New Names, by NoViolet Bulawayo
by Rebecca Scherm
From the Archives: NoViolet Bulawayo’s stunning debut novel asks difficult questions amid the contrasting landscapes of a Zimbabwe shantytown and bone-chilling Michigan.
From the Archives: NoViolet Bulawayo’s stunning debut novel asks difficult questions amid the contrasting landscapes of a Zimbabwe shantytown and bone-chilling Michigan.
From the Archives: “I think characters resist being known in the way real people do. When I start to construct a character, I never begin with their deep dark secrets or biggest fears or hidden shame. I usually start with the surface details—physical features, occupation, interests—and over time, I learn the things the character secretly wants or hates or tries to hide.”
From the Archives: “Quatro’s stories are often fabulist, if fabulism is magical realism plus a reckoning.” Rebecca Scherm on Jamie Quatro’s debut collection, I Want to Show You More.
Learning from your teachers’ teachers: Elizabeth McCracken, V.V. Ganeshananthan, and Rebecca Scherm discuss the writing chain of influence.
“You know how questions can be hydras—you think you’ve solved one, and then two more sprout. I’m sure the desert will continue to baffle me in the future, but I’m excited to say my next book has more stamps in its passport.”
Rebecca Scherm on using charts while working on her debut novel, Unbecoming: “It helps me remember how messy this process was, how difficult. I need to see the record of that mess to believe that I can do this again.”
“Raised on Southern manners, I thrill at the way Gilchrist foxtrots through tea-sipping customs while exposing all manner of prejudice through her narrator, ten-year-old Rhoda, who absorbs the language of the adults around her and then spits it back at them indiscriminately”: Rebecca Scherm explores the power of child narrators through Ellen Gilchrist’s story “Revenge.”
“Dick” is a snorter, a mean cackler, a muffled hooter. It’s a story to read on the subway home from a maddening staff meeting, or on your front steps after a surreal and unpleasant interaction with a neighbor, or to prepare for a holiday with extended family. Ann Ponders (har har) moves her husband and son from L.A. to Colorado, hoping to leave everything unnerving behind: her snorting, smoking daughter Lizzie, “clever and duplicitous” in “the whole smooth suit of skin she wore without thinking”; her Alzheimer’s-addled mother, now in a nursing home; her young son’s best friend, Dick, who […]
This week’s feature is Jamie Quatro’s debut collection, I Want to Show You More, which was just published by Grove Press. Quatro’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Oxford American, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. A finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and the winner of the 2011 American Short Fiction Story Contest, she is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and was the Georges and Anne Borchardt Scholar at the 2011 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She holds graduate degrees from the College […]
Over the course of these stories, a conviction emerges: faith and lust are not unalike.
