“Enright works magic here, making visible in Actress the primal origin stories embedded in and surrounding our own, tracing the most intricate of spirals: a double helix—two strands of connected story.”
“The strongest characters in this book are the ones who are most adrift, most ready to latch onto whatever comes next, and this makes them both tragic and dangerous”: Steve Wingate on Maxim Loskutoff’s debut collection.
“I wanted to look seriously at a type of relationship that’s all but universal for girls and women, a close friendship between adolescents, and to accord it the attention and depth I believe it deserves”:
“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 had been pushing my character, and maybe even my sister, into an ‘other’ box, inadvertently dehumanizing her experience, when what I needed to do instead was bring her into my own head more completely and fold our experiences together.”
Johanna Skibsrud talks to Molly Antopol about Quartet for the End of Time‘s musical legacy and the political and personal histories at the heart of her latest novel.
Mannequin Girl, Ellen Litman’s second novel, is a coming-of-age story and a family drama set in a Moscow boarding school for children with scoliosis.
It was October 2005, and professionally and personally, I was rudderless. Where had I gone wrong? In the preceding two years, I’d finished serving my grad school sentence and been released from Boulder. Back in Chicago, the city in which I’d grown up, I’d taken a one-bedroom apartment in a baseball-sodden neighborhood with scant street parking. I was halfheartedly teaching some community college comp and developmental reading courses (my sole qualification for getting the unclaimed developmental reading assignment: my willingness to take the teacher’s edition and my vow to learn something in the days before I’d have to face the […]
“The stories I love most are the ones that feel novelistic in scope, where you can feel the writer pouring absolutely everything [they have] into the story, until there’s nothing left in them and they have to try to imagine an entirely new world.”
Busch was an incredibly important and influential author and teacher prior to his death in 2006, and a voice of contemporary fiction who we are happy to have the opportunity to honor in a small way.
Surprising Things Can Happen: An Interview with Kristen Roupenian
Part of a Bigger Conversation: An Interview with Rebecca Makkai
If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi: An Interview with Neel Patel
Sometimes Taking Things Out Counts as Writing: an Interview with Celeste Ng
Influences: An Interview with Tobias Wolff
Stories We Love: “Blue Lenses,” by Daphne Du Maurier
Stories We Love: “White Angel,” by Michael Cunningham
Stories We Love: Donald Barthelme’s “The School,” In Which is Revealed the Meaning of Life
Stories We Love: "A Small, Good Thing" by Raymond Carver
Stories We Love: "The Fall River Axe Murders," by Angela Carter
