In conversation with Julie Judkins, author Scott Nadelson discusses how the “mad mystic hammering” of Bob Dylan inspired him to become a writer, why being a formerly reluctant reader informs his teaching, and how New Jersey has evolved in his fiction from an actual place to a state of being.
V. Jo Hsu considers Rahul Mehta’s debut story collection, which she says addresses issues connected to sexual, racial, and cultural identities in artful ways, and through evocative language.
Last week we featured Miracle Boy as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Kate Thompson (@kateEthompson) Francesca Miller (@creoleimp) Angela Meyer (@LiteraryMinded) To claim your copy of this collection, please email us at the following address: winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!
Known for stories and novels that force us to question the conventional dichotomy between realist and fantasy fiction, Kevin Brockmeier knows how to reveal the strangeness of the world around us. In conversation with Mary Stewart Atwell, Brockmeier discusses his new novel, The Illumination, and the compelling metaphors that inform his writing.
Alissa Nutting has “story” written in ink on every page of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, her lively, well-imagined, and jaw-droppingly smart prize-winning debut. Imagine Donald Barthelme writing smart feminine narratives, Mary Gaitskill sans the kinky sex, or Margaret Atwood turning to dry, Colbert-style humor, and you may start to get an idea of what to expect.
Andrew Wingfield’s short story collection examines how suburban sprawl in a neighborhood outside of Washington, D.C. impacts its inhabitants, both human and animal. Residents new and old must navigate rapid economic and social change in the face of American politics.
Forrest Anderson on the semester he “caught fire as a writer,” when Ron Rash handed him a life-changing copy of Dale Ray Phillips’s debut, My People’s Waltz. Anderson describes the exquisite moments of grace in the collection when “all of the bad things to come are brewing on the horizon but haven’t yet managed to fully snag the family.”
The longlist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award has just come out, and here at FWR, we’re thrilled to have featured many of the writers on it in interviews, reviews, and essays, including: Anthony Doerr, for Memory Wall Danielle Evans, for Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self Siobhan Fallon, for You Know When the Men Are Gone Alan Heathcock, for Volt Valerie Laken, for Separate Kingdoms Yiyun Li, for Golden Boy, Emerald Girl Offered by the Munster Literature Centre, the 35,000-euro prize is the largest for a short story collection. The shortlist will be announced in July. […]
Editor’s note: What? Isn’t Short Story Month over? Yes, it is—but that doesn’t mean we stop loving short stories. So here’s an encore round of “Stories We Love.” In “Map of the City,” a story from her new collection Separate Kingdoms, Valerie Laken portrays the life of an American college student in perostroika-era Moscow. The story is brilliantly structured—the names of Moscow metro stations head the various sections, each of which captures a new moment in time and space and thereby mimics the experience of using the subway: you descend into one station and resurface at another. Perestroika, after all, […]
Pioneer High School students Carlina Duan and Allison Kennedy sit down with famed Ann Arbor writing teacher and teen center director Jeff Kass to discuss his recent story collection, Knuckleheads. Kass discusses knuckleheadedness as a state of being, why being an outsider is important, the influence of Springsteen on his fiction, and the reason he wrote this book—in part—for his students. Bonus Track: an original off-the-top-of-the-dome list poem by Kass on “happiness.”
