CRAFT
Master of the Touching Detail: Emmanuel Bove, the Ultimate Writer’s Writer
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…
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Practicing the Ecstatic: On the Value of Escapist Fiction in the Internet Age
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…
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Thick with Noir: Tom Lutz’s BORN SLIPPY
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…
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Art of the Opening: Laura van den Berg
A friend tells you a story. It makes you pause each time you enter the bathroom, eyes sliding to the linen closet. Each time you pull a fresh bath towel from the shelf, the warm musk of cedar reaching…
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An Analysis of the Narrative Voice in Yoko Ogawa’s THE DIVING POOL
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…
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Interview: Joe Sacksteder
Joe Sacksteder debuted twice last year: with his first full-length story collection Make/Shift in April, and his first novel Driftless Quintet in November. Between the two, he showcases a number of forms and a blend of genres. Flip through…
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Revise Like a Scientist: A Method Approach to Finding the Right Treatment for Your Story
By Lynne Griffin • “My pencils outlast my erasers.” —Vladimir Nabokov “I’m all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.” —Truman Capote There’s consensus among writers that writing is…
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This or That: Simultaneity in John O’Hara’s BUTTERFIELD 8
By Ian Randall Wilson • When I wrote in third person, it was in third-person close. The concerns of simultaneity didn’t occupy much of my attention. There may be a flaw in my thinking here, but my reasoning was…
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The Grind: Revelatory Repetition in Edward P. Jones’s “An Orange Line Train to Ballston”
By Alyson Mosquera Dutemple • In the very first line of his story “An Orange Line Train to Ballston,” Edward P. Jones signals to readers to expect repetition and recurrence throughout the rest of the piece: “The first time…
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On (Not) Writing the Bar Story Part II: The Instructor
By Mike Goodwin • In my brief career teaching fiction workshops, the bar story has appeared too often as a genre vying for literariness. Students have written about debauchery at house parties, barns, parks, cemeteries, and, of course, bars.…
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