“I still want to pull off a trick, but I always want to make that trick get at something real.” David James Poissant chats with Mark Polanzak about his new collection, The OK End of Funny Town, out now from BOA Editions.
“It’s the story of a self-centered young man who glimpses the future and finds it covered in flab.” Chuck Augello on T.C. Boyle’s “Thawing Out.”
“I’m interested specifically in the inner turmoil, the emotional price and weight, of self-betrayal and deception as it is experienced and enacted by queer people.” Lee Thomas talks with Peter Kispert about his debut collection.
“This sounds like a lot. And it is. But van den Berg presents it all with remarkable economy.” Elizabeth Mayer on Laura van den Berg’s “Hill of Hell.” Look for van den Berg’s new collection, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, from FSG in July.
“And though all the violence is ultimately, like most violence, senseless, it is not impossible to understand”: Leigh Camacho Rourks on Tom Franklin’s “Poachers.”
“I think that the whole project of fiction is that you’re asking somebody to leave themselves and be somebody else in this fictive space”: Catherine Lacey talks with Danielle Lavaque-Manty about short fiction, identity shedding, the poetics of sentences, and more.
“What exactly did Carver do to make his character’s isolation so palpable that I felt it physically?” Amber Wheeler Bacon on Raymond Carver’s deeply affecting “Are You a Doctor?”
Robert James Russell speaks with Sara Rauch about her debut collection, finding inspiration in the literary arts and beyond, the role of writers in the public sphere, and the enduring value (and need) of showing how we’re all connected.
Shawn Andrew Mitchell on Gifts of Love, Meaning, and Craft in Aimee Bender’s “The Red Ribbon.”
“I wondered if this was going to be too on the nose, if the students would feel provoked or become defensive.” George McCormick on teaching George Saunders’s “Home” in an Army town.
