“She captures so beautifully the isolation that many feel in an increasingly cloistered Midwest, the desperation we all experience in our teeter-totter of needs and wants”: Mike Ferro appreciates Laura Hulthen Thomas’s “Sole Suspect” in this Stories We Love essay.
“Driscoll was a poet before turning to fiction. Poetic language is dreamlike, and therefore suited to close narration. And Driscoll’s elegant language anchors the reader in the haunting dream.”
“They thrive under repeated analysis”: Jennifer Audette grapples with the twelve stories that make up Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut collection, Heads of the Colored People, out now from 37ink/Atria.
“Can one really learn by copying?”: Michael Noll discusses borrowing moves from great writers.
“This is the last gift of King’s story—her decision to allow happiness to have the last word, to make the ephemeral feeling permanent, if only in fiction”: Lillian Li on Lily King’s One Story story.
“The strongest characters in this book are the ones who are most adrift, most ready to latch onto whatever comes next, and this makes them both tragic and dangerous”: Steve Wingate on Maxim Loskutoff’s debut collection.
Join us for our tenth-annual celebration of the short story, as we dedicate the month of May to short fiction.
“His fiction is baffling and fresh enough to revert even experienced readers back into novices”: Eric McDowell on metafiction and writing lessons in César Aira’s “The All That Ploughs through the Nothing.” Aira’s latest in translation, The Little Buddhist Monk & The Proof, comes out today from New Directions.
“I suppose if flash fiction were a running form, it would be a sprint. One that requires a lot of thinking and training and art to have a good, solid race”: Kim Chinquee with Steve Wingate on her new collection of flash fiction, Veer, out this spring from Ravenna Press.
“The author gives us just what she promised: more than meets the eye”: Mari Carlson on Becky Hagenston’s “Scavengers.”
