[Reviewlet] The Beach at Galle Road, by Joanna Luloff
by Tyler McMahon
No expats hungry for exoticism here, Joanna Luloff’s debut collection brings the trials and triumphs of Sri Lankans during the civil war to the fore.
No expats hungry for exoticism here, Joanna Luloff’s debut collection brings the trials and triumphs of Sri Lankans during the civil war to the fore.
Down-and-out Benjamin Benjamin on a zany road trip riddled with crises – mechanical, personal, existential.
Jesús Ángel García’s debut “transmedia” novel, badbadbad is fast, fun, irreverent, and unlike anything else in the fiction aisle. Starring a lead character who shares the author’s name, the book follows his descent from devout webmaster to the obsessed savior of a pornographic social network. Also included: a documentary, a soundtrack, a chapter-by-chapter YouTube playlist.
A bookish fifteen-year-old breaches taboos in the small New England town of Wick. Poet Rebecca Wolff’s masterful first novel is an Appalachian folk ballad rendered gothic–full of sex and ghosts, mixing caution and temptation, obsessed with origins but somehow timeless.
Last week we featured How the Mistakes Were Made as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Laurence Pritchard (@Laurence99) Daniel Levin (@Daniel_Levin) Rick Rofihe (@RickRofihe) To claim your copy of this collection, 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!
This week’s feature is Tyler McMahon’s How the Mistakes Were Made, published this week by St. Martin’s Griffin. Born and raised in the Washington, DC area, Tyler McMahon studied at the University of Virginia and Boise State University. Before writing his first novel, he worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador, a surf instructor in California, and waiter in Montana. He co-edited the anthologies Surfing’s Greatest Misadventures and Fishing’s Greatest Misadventures for Casagrande Press. He lives in Honolulu with his wife, food writer Dabney Gough, and teaches in the English Department at Hawaii Pacific University. His short stories […]
Tyler McMahon’s new novel, How the Mistakes Were Made, is a tragedy set to rock and roll. In this conversation with Caleb Winters, McMahon recalls the paranoia of Cold War America, shares his experiences touring with a band, and reveals how writing can be like church.
(Editor’s note: “Stories We Love” made its debut as part of Fiction Writers Review’s Short Story Month celebration. But we love short stories year-round. So here’s another installment, courtesy of FWR contributor Tyler McMahon.) As an undergraduate, I took my first fiction-writing workshop around 1997. It didn’t go well. My peers were entrenched in Mafia stories and Christian parables. I failed to find my voice. The instructor was accepted into law school for the following fall, and declared there was no future in writing. Near the semester’s end, she invited one of her fellow graduate students, Eric Rickstad, to visit. […]
A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism is not your grandfather’s expat novel. In this smart debut, Peter Mountford rolls up his sleeves and delivers a crash course in Latin American history, contemporary economics, and international politics—all within a page-turning story about the dreams and gaffes of a twenty-something American working for an unscrupulous hedge fund in Bolivia.
Tyler McMahon loves short stories but worries that collections might be the worst thing to have happened to the genre. However, books like Alan Heathcock’s Volt renew his faith in the collection as an art form of its own, one that makes its stories inseparable from one another—greater even than the sum of their parts.
