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.
Alice Gregory and Thomas Mallon request sequels in the New York Times Bookends column. After sifting through some recent, popular marriage novels like Fates and Furies and Gone Girl, Gregory…
An unorthodox conversation, or experimental, two-way interview between Jesse Ball and Catherine Lacey at BOMB yields miscommunication, communication, repetition, randomness, push, pull, aphorism, and wisdom. On reading contemporary literature, Ball says:…
Lucy Ives writes about Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors for the Los Angeles Review of Books: It’s a study of a baby and of babies, of culture and of vulnerability. Most…
…while poems often proceed by way of large imaginative leaps, I found that prose urged me to stay put longer and extrapolate more. At Guernica, Christopher Kondrich and Tracy K.…
There’s a way in which poets are always ahead of their time, if they’re good enough to be universal. At The Poetry Foundation, Alexandra Pechman describes how Marianne Moore’s poetry…
“There is an extraordinary freedom to make your own intellectual choices that’s part of the reading process,” says C.E. Morgan, of her readers and her own reading process, in conversation…
Certainly some of my favorite songs are the ones that, weeks later, or months later, or sometimes even years later, you get hit by a lyric that you suddenly understand…
Clay Byars—author of Will & I, his recently released memoir about being an identical twin—tackles big life questions and the writing process with Drew Broussard for FSG Originals. Edited by Byars’s friend…
For the New York Times Bookends column, Rivka Galchen walks us through a deceptively simple poem by Zbigniew Herbert to illustrate a philosophy that supports both the abstract and the moral responsibility…
We follow Heffernan through the Smithsonian Natural Museum of Internet History, as she annotates the exhibits: the Kindle, with its lithe design and endless supply of books, usurper of the…
At the Kenyon Review blog, Brian Michael Murphy celebrates the sheer density of reference and intricate structuring of rap lyrics revealed by a computer program, The Raplyzer, and its Rhyme…
Pete Ross takes huge issue with the infiltration of content marketers and voracious “personal brand” builders at Medium and elsewhere. His point is clear: writing is more than posturing to…