“It’s an act of communication of something that I wasn’t sure I was allowed to say to somebody who wasn’t sure they were allowed to feel what they were feeling.” Peter Ho Davies talks with Travis Holland about his new novel, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself.
“It is Ndiaye’s voice—resonate, ruthlessly matter-of-fact, deeply wounded—which will be our light in this blood-soaked landscape of rusting barbed wire and whizzing shrapnel.” Travis Holland reviews David Diop’s At Night All Blood is Black.
“Ford has long been something of a roamer, both in life and in his fiction, and that roaming and the restlessness which drives it are front and center in Sorry for Your Trouble.” Travis Holland reviews Richard Ford’s new collection.
“None of us knows what these coming months will bring.” Travis Holland revisits William Maxwell’s 1937 novel, They Came Like Swallows, set during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, meditating on stillness, absence, and memory during the current crisis.
“If memory is a museum to which we all repeatedly return, then perhaps David’s anguish is the price of admission he must pay to keep Imogen alive in the only way the dead can be kept alive.” Travis Holland reviews Jonathan Buckley’s novel The Great Concert of the Night.
Travis Holland on Nicholas Delbanco as a master teacher, as well as Delbanco’s approach to running a writing workshop that matters: “This is good, now let’s make it better.”
Do early heroes stand the test of time? Hemingway may be a young writer’s writer… who still keeps you late at the bar.
“What a bitch of a thing prose is!” Gustave Flaubert wrote in a letter to his lover Louise Colet in 1852. “It’s never finished; there’s always something to redo. Yet I think one can give it the consistency of verse. A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.” In this essay, contributing editor Travis Holland meditates on Flaubert’s influence and legacy in fiction.
In this lively conversation, Travis Holland and author Richard Ford discuss the genesis of Ford’s most famous fictional character, Frank Bascombe, the importance of always remembering the reader, greeting cards, what could well be one of the greatest short stories of the 20th century, and why place in fiction means nothing.
Travis Holland talks with fiction master Tobias Wolff about the pleasures and anxieties of influence, the changing societal role of writer-celebrities, and the reasons Wolff has “always been attracted to the incisiveness, velocity, exactitude, precision of the short story.”
