“Housefulls, Churchfulls, Airportsfull”
In an extended essay in the New Yorker, Megan Marshall, author of the forthcoming Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, writes about Bishop’s late, serendipitous move to Harvard where she met…
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Kirstin Allio
96 posts
Kirstin Allio is currently a Howard Foundation Fellow at Brown University. Her story collection, Clothed, Female Figure comes out with Dzanc in 2016. Her novel, Garner (Coffee House), was a finalist for the LA Times Book Award for First Fiction. She has received the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” Award, a PEN/O. Henry Prize, and has published many short stories, poems, and essays.
The Ordinary Extraordinary
In an interview with Mark Greif for Los Angeles Review of Books, Greg Gerke frames Against Everything as an essay collection that faces outward, more political and less personal, despite…
“A Changed World”
Don’t write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that’s not changing. Let that do the work. Paul Beatty’s formally experimental, informally…
Ponsot’s Patience
The poet Marie Ponsot is a late-blooming ninety-five. For the New York Times Book Review, William Logan reviews her new Collected Poems (Knopf), and follows her arc from early “secondhand Tolkein,”…
Mood Music
At Largehearted Boy, essayist, literary experimentalist, and scholar Mary Capello shares an annotated playlist for her new essay collection, Life Breaks In (University of Chicago Press). She describes mood as…
The Long Game
I’ve kept writer’s notebooks for probably almost 20 years now. I’m very slow to fill them… the notebook I have now I’ve had for nine years now—it’s really beat up.…
Short Story vs. Novel
Over at The Story Prize blog, Lynne Stegner, whose new collection, For All the Obvious Reasons, came out with Arcade Publishing in June 2016, has an apt description of narrative compression…
Band Names for Books
Spoiler alert: there are no cannibals in Mike Roberts’s new post-9/11 novel Cannibals in Love, but there’s a lot to admire. Over at FSG Originals, Will Chancellor gets granular in conversation…
The Generosity of Kristin Dombek
In her new book, The Selfishness of Others, Kristin Dombek turns her deliberate inquisition and dry humor on the suddenly ubiquitous if “sketchy” word narcissism. In conversation with Laura Creste…
Maggie Nelson’s Natural
Reading Maggie Nelson can be like banging your head against the wall of categories—or being miraculously freed from them. At Fiction Advocate, Colter Ruland elicits an explanation of hybridity from…
Steering Clear of “McMagic”
At the New Yorker, an elegant and comprehensive essay by Julie Phillips from a visit with Ursula Le Guin at her home in Portland, Oregon touches on the importance of place,…