“I love this story because it’s haunting, and hauntingly well-wrought”: Ellen Prentiss Campbell celebrates Josephine Jacobsen and her story “The Edge of the Sea.”
“Chu’s greatest accomplishment through his stories of clean, well-lighted spaces is his gift for telegraphing a message of understanding, of giving the benefit of the doubt, and above all, of respecting those around us”: Michael A. Ferro reviews Vincent Chu’s debut collection, Like a Champion, out now from 7.13 Books.
“A close examination of economy and endings in this collection reveals several craft choices made by the author that consistently bolster efficiency and surprise.”
“A writer can create a more just world in books by shining a light on that injustice”: Yang Huang chats with Kaitlin Solimine about family, Chinese history, and her new collection, My Old Faithful, winner of the University of Massachusetts Press Juniper Prize for Fiction.
“Each one of these stories—each of these characters—leans heavily on another”: Christi Craig reviews Yang Huang’s new collection of linked stories, My Old Faithful, winner of the University of Massachusetts’s Juniper Prize for Fiction.
“But there is a catch, a move du Maurier makes that transforms the story from a claustrophobic exploration of gender confinement and powerlessness to something stranger and more sinister”: In this Stories We Love essay, Michael Shou-Yung Shum takes on Daphne du Maurier’s “Blue Lenses.”
“Like the multitudinous star fields that encompass the known universe, Heathcock’s universe is made not only of dark material, but light”: Shann Ray on the human form under pressure in Alan Heathcock’s “The Staying Freight.”
“It’s these aetherial worlds referred to in the title, these never-existing possibilities that Tolstaya explores through her writing. Texts, stories, are the essences that construct our lives. Whether consciously or unconsciously, whether intentionally fabricating or telling our version of the truth, we’re creating, with language, a narrative.”
“What’s a good fabulist to do when every day the world offers as reality, posits as entirely normal, the surreal images of our nightmares?”: Hasanthika Sirisena reviews Ramona Ausubel’s latest collection, Awayland, out now from Riverhead Books.
Venita Blackburn and Malinda McCollum talk about dangerous women in short fiction, loss as a narrative catalyst, the stories of ZZ Packer and David Foster Wallace, and their own recently published collections.
