CRAFT ESSAYS, ELEMENTS, and TALKS
Art of the Opening: What’s an Opening to Do?
Toward a Taxonomy of How Stories Start An invitation. A doorway. A promise to—or even contract with—the reader. There are various ways to think about the opening of a story, but rather than consider what it should be, let’s…
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Detail: Applying a James Wood Lens to Deborah Eisenberg’s “Like It or Not”
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…
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Looking at LOVE: Toni Morrison’s Construction of Desire and Obstacle
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…
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Hybrid Interview: Megan Cummins
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…
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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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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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