The Dark and Other Love Stories, by Deborah Willis
by Emily Nagin
“It’s rare to read a book that’s right nearly all the way through”: Emily Nagin on Deborah Willis’s new collection, The Dark and Other Love Stories.
“It’s rare to read a book that’s right nearly all the way through”: Emily Nagin on Deborah Willis’s new collection, The Dark and Other Love Stories.
“I tell my students to focus on developing aspects of their characters that they don’t share”: Neil Connelly talks with Steven Wingate about presses tiny and huge, teaching in MFA programs, and his new collection, In the Wake of Our Vows.
“Always Happy Hour combines all the addictive ingredients of a pop song with a self-awareness and emotional insight that is both searing and deeply sympathetic”: Emily Nagin on Mary Miller’s latest collection.
“This collection, as a whole, is not about the Space Age, per se. Still, that place and time exquisitely inflect each story.”
“So much else disappears, yet it feels like most of us have a handful of stories we tell ourselves about how we became the people we are, stories that ideally would probably get swapped out over time as we grow and heal and go forward.”
“I think when I look at culture I’m trying to look beyond two opposing worlds. I’m looking at the smaller works at play. Family culture. Work culture. In many of the stories in the collection some of these come in conflict with one another.”
“You know how questions can be hydras—you think you’ve solved one, and then two more sprout. I’m sure the desert will continue to baffle me in the future, but I’m excited to say my next book has more stamps in its passport.”
James Magruder sits down with Kathy Flann to talk about her new collection, Get a Grip, her path to fiction, the role humor plays in her work, writing in the second-person point of view, and more.
Continuing our interview series with writers of rural fiction, Mary Stewart Atwell talks with Bonnie Jo Campbell about her newest collection, Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, as well as nostalgia versus reality, novels as failed stories, and more.
“By peppering his prose with subtle, sinister details,” Jacob M. Appel argues in this craft essay, “Chaon manages to create a subtext of tension that supports the weight of the story’s content.”
