Maria Chiang

“The Situation in American Writing” is a questionnaire (based on The Partisan Review‘s in 1939) that Full Stop has sent out to dozens of authors: “These questions are provocative because,…

“That’s one of the refreshing aspects of Peter Orner’s Love and Shame and Love: It isn’t a political novel per se, but the Chicago men and women who inhabit these…

“It’s the stuff of dreams: proof that those evenings spent hunched over a desk, typing furiously might, just might, not be in vain; that Paul Giamatti’s character from Sideways does…

“But when the portraits are all juxtaposed with Norman Mailer’s muscular descriptions of the traumas of her childhood, the whole thing is just too brutal. Mailer relates how, by Monroe’s…

“Yet despite such a rich Catholic literary heritage with many contemporary admirers — one can’t help thinking of how passionately the MFA/Creative Writing/Workshop establishment venerates the stories of Flannery O’Connor…

“The 158-page The Sea is My Brother, a tale of two young men serving on a voyage from Boston to Greenland, has been known about for some time, but is…