No addition without subtraction: A Conversation with Hilary Leichter
As fiction writers, we’re always saying that what we write is not “real,” but as soon as we write it, it becomes a part of the world.
Features & Reviews
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Everyone sees themselves as the main character: A conversation with Larrison Campbell
When you’re writing about family, there's what’s really relevant and has meaning to you. And then there’s what has meaning to the audience.
I Had to Make it Mean Something: A Conversation with John Cotter
. . . the process of writing really was a devotion. It gave me a reason to keep going. And because I’m interested in formal problems, it was the crafting of sentences, finding rhythms, shaping my material that helped me to get hold of it.
When the Underworld Comes Knocking: Colson Whitehead’s Crook Manifesto
“You were a cop and then a robber and a cop again,” recalls Officer Munson. And on this fateful night, he wants Carney to play again, this time with deadly stakes.
The Price of Power, Cannibalism, and Transmutation: A Conversation with Shanta Lee Gander
While I do see there is importance in recognizing identity, I also want there to be a broader field to go beyond the identity itself, the identities that were forced upon us, in addition to what we continue to reinforce and agree upon as identity.
Maybe Home is the Thing We Carry: A Conversation with Janika Oza
. . . This is a story of a family trying to find their place in a world that is constantly shifting beneath them, and I wanted them and their relationships and emotions and memories at the center of this narrative.
Nonbinary Thinking: Stephanie Burt’s We Are Mermaids
We’re reminded that the first creatures that crawled out of the ocean were fish that evolved to walk on land. What are we if not constantly evolving?
The Trap of Domesticity: Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo
Between a stream-of-consciousness-inspired prose, image patterns, and consistent pivots of thought, Kanai establishes the most surprising thing about this novel: its ability to make the vertiginous hypnotic.
“A Mirror and a Window”: A Conversation with Jiordan Castle
I think the older we get, we change, but we still love what we love. We still have the same little shames and little happies and all these things that make us us from when we first started becoming whoever we were going to be.
Writing the Emotional Stakes of the Mundane: A Conversation with Alexandra Chang
As a writer, I really like working with constraints and getting to play with different structures, voices, moods, and characters. The simple fact that short stories are short gives me all of that.
The Mind of a Female Killer: My Men by Victoria Kielland
But while Cather’s eponymous Antonia rises above rumor and gossip through resilience, optimism, and an irresistibly endearing authenticity, forging happiness on her own terms, the story of Kielland’s Belle is alternatively uncomfortable and haunting.
The Poems Are a Part of How I’m Living: A Conversation with Edgar Kunz
The poems help me to see that, for the most part, I’m just doing my best, even when my best isn’t very good and I’m confused and flailing around.