“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.
“The truth is that a blank page makes beginners of us all.” Bryan Furuness asks five writers for advice on the perennial problem of getting started.
Our most recent feature was Steven Schwartz’s new collection, Little Raw Souls, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Lydia Netzer (@lostcheerio) MRS. CareFree MEL (@melskepko) Kevin (@kswinterwrites) Congrats! To claim your free copy, 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! Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books out there!
Our current feature is Steven Schwartz”s newest collection, Little Raw Souls, which was published last week by Pittsburgh-based indie press Autumn House. Schwartz teaches in the residential MFA program at Colorado State University and the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. Recently, he has become fiction editor at Colorado Review. He is the author of two story collections, To Leningrad in Winter (University of Missouri) and Lives of the Fathers (University of Illinois), and two novels, Therapy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and A Good Doctor’s Son (William Morrow). His fiction has received the Nelson Algren Award, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, […]
With the release of Steven Schwartz’s new collection, Little Raw Souls, Steve Wingate speaks with the author about character preoccupations, the differences between working with indie publishers and major houses, autobiography in fiction, and more.
We’ve all had the experience of knowing we recorded, somewhere, a great line or perfect image, only to futilely search for it. Could it be that unconsciously we don’t want to recover that perfect line? Because when we finally do come across it, weeks or months later, we discover that the exact phrasing doesn’t fit the story we’re telling or the character we’ve developed. What fits is the approximate version, conjured from the shadows of memory. To be truly “found” or recovered for creative purposes, memory may indeed depend on the process of transmutation.
