CRAFT ESSAYS, ELEMENTS, and TALKS
The Semantics of Belonging: Asian American Identity and Cost of the American Dream in Ling Ma’s SEVERANCE
By Khushi Daryani • “Only in America do you have the luxury of being depressed,” claims Ruifang from Ling Ma’s Severance (Ma, 226). A recently resurfaced novel due to its uncanny similarity to the global pandemic, it contains several…
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Shaping, Containing, and Dissecting Emotion in Kristen Radtke’s SEEK YOU
By Stephanie Trott • I learned to love long-form graphic narratives during a time often associated with loneliness: college. Neither wunderkind nor department darling, I often felt an imposter in my undergraduate English classes and struggled to determine one…
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Hybrid Interview: Alexandra Kleeman
Essay by Claire Lobenfeld • Alexandra Kleeman’s latest novel Something New Under the Sun is a book about plague. Not necessarily about sickness—although there is an age-agnostic form of dementia in its pages—but the Biblical kind. A novelist moves…
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Classics in the Maze: Michael Ende’s THE MIRROR IN THE MIRROR: A LABYRINTH
utque ope virginea nullis iterata priorum ianua difficilis filo est inuenta relecto —Ovid, Metamorphoses Das stammt alles aus anderen Zeiten. —Michael Ende, Der Spiegel im Spiegel. Ein Labyrinth Essay by Tamara Beneyto • Writer Michael Ende is mainly…
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Hybrid Interview: Matt Bell
Essay by Jesse Motte • Matt Bell’s new novel, Appleseed, explores the climate-disaster subgenre through an interlocking system of storytelling whereby myth, legend, and Bell’s own originality converge. The novel follows three characters as they navigate the spaces between…
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Flesh and Blood Ideas in J.M. Coetzee’s ELIZABETH COSTELLO
By Maggie Kast • When I’ve given a character my own thoughts on a subject close to my heart, I’ve heard critiques of my writing like, “Sounds authorial,” or, “Your character wouldn’t say that—those are your ideas.” Explication by…
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The Second Iceberg Theory
By Matthew Duffus • Every fiction writer I know is familiar with Ernest Hemingway’s “Iceberg Theory,” explained most succinctly in Death in the Afternoon, his nonfiction book on bullfighting: “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he…
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Hybrid Interview: Tyler Gillespie
Essay by Sam Risak • “Florida man arrested for calling 911 after kitten denied entry into strip club.” “Florida man once arrested for fighting drag queen with tiki torch runs for mayor.” “Florida man killed by alligator while hiding…
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Art of the Opening: What Is It Like to Be a Protagonist?
How Alexander Weinstein establishes experiential reality right off the bat As much as we love being immersed in the expansive world of a novel, story collections have a notable advantage over novels: variety of characters, circumstances, themes and, crucially…
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Hybrid Interview: Kiare Ladner
Essay by April Yee • How do we reconstruct a self that has been erased? Whether the erasure is the result of forces macro (a police state) or micro (an abusive parent), what remains is the need to fill…
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