Posts by author
Kirstin Allio
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“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 Alice Methfessel, a young “house secretary” who would become her…
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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 its origins in rarified academia. Greif cites the influence and…
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“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 humanely scathing novel about race, The Sellout, has just won…
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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,” to a letting go of “hollow immensities.” “We read such…
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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 “companion and muse” for her writing: If there is…
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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. Over at Chicago Review of Books, Lisa Katzenberger speaks with…
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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 and the exquisite burden of the short story form: So…
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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 with Roberts on the episodic nature of memory, and the ways…
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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 at the Ploughshares blog, Dombek talks about the origins and offshoots of…
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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 Nelson: I just do what’s natural, I’m not thinking, “this…
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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, both geographic and imaginative. Phillips writes, “[Le Guin] has always…