By Amy Barnes • Nancy Stohlman’s bio reads: Writer, Professor, Performer. Her new craft book, Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction, explores aspects of flash fiction including inspiration, writing, editing, workshopping, the form, collections, and an index of…
Essay by Jesse Motte • In a period of world history characterized largely by mandated physical distancing, Chloe N. Clark’s debut collection, Collective Gravities, is an important reference for navigating inner and outer spaces. The collection, driven by character…
By Maria Cichosz • The first time I tried to turn part of my novel into a publishable excerpt, I immediately knew it was hopeless. I had just finished working on one novel and was deep into another, having…
By Christopher Hathaway • In reading James Wood’s literary criticism, specifically the essays “What Chekhov Meant by Life,” “Serious Noticing,” and “Anna Karenina and Characterisation” from his latest collection, Serious Noticing, one comes to understand how detail functions in…
By Emilee Prado • Toni Morrison’s novel Love grapples with the vast, mutable, apparitional human experience that we compress into that four-letter word taken as the title. For those who have fallen in and out of romantic love, for…
Framing the Stories: If the Body Allows It by Megan Cummins Essay by Laura Spence-Ash • The architecture of If the Body Allows It, Megan Cummins’s stunning debut story collection, is unique: there are two sets of stories within…
By Peter Selgin • Beckett said of him, “More than anyone else he has the instinct for the touching detail.” Anyone who has read the works of Emmanuel Bove (1898–1945) would agree. This is especially the case with Bove’s…
By Tim Weed • Ours is an age of online media. We imbibe great doses of it through our laptops and smartphones and large-screen TVs. With the help of algorithmically informed techniques that are addictive and sometimes close to…
By Sean Hooks • “A drunk sees the world in fragments and I wanted to recreate that,” says Karl Hyde of pioneering British electronica outfit Underworld. “The first time we played it live, people raised their lager cans and…
By Geoffrey Miller • A different woman character narrates each of the trio of novellas in Yoko Ogawa’s collection The Diving Pool. In the opening, titular piece there’s Aya, a school-aged girl living at a countryside orphanage run by…
