Kirstin Valdez Quade talks with Emily Nagin about turning her story “The Five Wounds” into a novel, the process of following new threads in a narrative, and learning from your characters along the way.
“Site Fidelity is a delight to read at the sentence and individual story scale, but it truly becomes a marvel when viewed as a collection.” Michael Welch reviews Claire Boyles’s debut story collection, out soon from W.W. Norton.
“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 […]
