From the Archives: Dzanc Books and 826michigan founder Steven Gillis talks about the “rogue warrior” Renaissance in indie publishing and his new collection, The Law of Strings.
“As a novelist, my favorite fictional conceit is simply to shove a lot of things into one character’s life. In the case of Jacinto, I made him experience virtually all of the anecdotes I’d read about or heard of—from all over Mexico and the American West.”
“Amend does a remarkable job making Frances’s story feels less like a novel and more like a real life”: Tyler McMahon on Allison Amend’s new novel, Enchanted Islands.
“West of Sunset is a welcome corrective for the Shakespeare-in-Love brand of writer idolatry, in which talent and will overcome all obstacles. Instead, this is the portrait of the artist as an old man, after the promise and the fame have been stripped away, and only the writing remains.”
“Fiction writers have a serious responsibility, especially when writing about something that others view as sacred”: Jon Keller with Tyler McMahon on Of Sea and Cloud, his debut novel about Maine lobstermen.
“I barely scraped the surface of the vast bank of medical cases I had at my disposal”: David Bajo talks with Tyler McMahon about the world of medicine, literary plotting, and Mercy 6, his latest novel.
“In Forest of Fortune, Ruland combines the tropes of hardboiled crime fiction with the creepy appeal of a ghost story, and riffs on elements from addiction/recovery narratives.”
“Writing the surfing scenes terrified me. I worried about pushing readers away—writing passages that would only connect to surfers and not to the larger audience. But the bigger concern was just what you describe: the inability to translate such a physical sensation onto the page.”
In its most poignant passages, A Life in Men unpacks the tired clichés about living life to the fullest.
Kristiana Kahakauwila talks with Tyler McMahon about her debut collection, This is Paradise, about the importance of coming back to her Hawaiian-ness to write this book, and about the ways that the stories function collectively to capture how she experiences Hawai`i’s multitude and diversity.
