Stories We Love: “Off,” by Aimee Bender
by Kent Kosack
Kent Kosack on the complexities of motivation and action in Aimee Bender’s “Off.”
Kent Kosack on the complexities of motivation and action in Aimee Bender’s “Off.”
“Wang’s understated wit and distinctive tone is undeniable, conjuring up connections to Kafka’s logic-riddled restraint, Camus’s detachment, and Lu Xun’s dark humor.”
Danielle LaVaque-Manty and Holly Goddard Jones sit down to talk about fabulism vs. realism, teaching and learning from students, and Jones’s new collection, Antipodes.
“In Schwartz’s fiction, as in life, it is often the unspoken or withheld that holds power”: Ellen Prentiss Campbell on the story “Stranger,” by Steven Schwartz, from his collection Madagascar.
Join us for our fourteenth-annual celebration of the short story, as we dedicate the month of May to short fiction.
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.
“Like my predecessors, I want to show us grappling, resisting, and (hopefully) healing, to show our full humanity in a country that was not designed with our freedom in mind, and in which those freedoms are still threatened, daily.” Deesha Philyaw talks with Melissa Scholes Young about her award-winning collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.
“Despite how powerfully the objects of our lives might obsess us or orient our attention, they are but one aspect of a larger lived experienced.” Costa B. Pappas on Clare Sestanovich’s debut collection, Objects of Desire, out soon from Knopf.
“Where Murakami truly shines in this collection is where he always has as a writer: when what’s on the page departs reality, when it embraces the odd and the strange.” Travis Holland reviews Haruki Murakami’s newest collection.
“Maybe how we choose to tell the stories of our pain can allow us to turn that pain into something greater, something necessary, something that might ease the pain of others.” Karin Killian on narrative technique in Lauren Groff’s “The Wind.”
