Kelsey Norris and I spoke in December. She was in Washington, DC and I was in St. Augustine, Florida, two arguably very different spaces to prepare for the holidays. We were also preparing for her to join me at…
Jennifer duBois’s latest novel, The Last Language, published this month with Milkweed Editions, explores the ethically precarious choices of Angela, a promising linguist and young mother who’s lost everything: her husband, her second pregnancy, and her place in a…
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…
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…
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…
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…
By Mark David Kaufman • James Joyce once observed that he had included so many “enigmas and puzzles” in Ulysses that professors would be preoccupied with the book “for centuries”—an effective way, he added, of “insuring one’s immortality.” Such…
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…
