Features & Reviews
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The First Book: Boo Trundle
If the writing process is healing, and if this healing process shapes the narrative, then maybe the reading experience can stimulate aspects of the same healing process.
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“Intimacy in the Telling”: A Conversation with Maggie Smith
I’m never in a hurry for a piece of writing to wrap up. And I almost never know how it will end.
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Coming-of-age into Fame: Ben Fama’s If I Close My Eyes
Masterful prose…a novel that takes an unflinching view of what some might do for fame and ratings.
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There’s Reality in Other Places: A Conversation with Kelsey Norris
Life’s weird. There’s reality in other places. I really like fiction and media that play with that strangeness.
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Every Line Break, an Elegy: A Conversation with Leslie Sainz
I feel strongly that our personal histories are made complete by their various discrepancies, not undermined by them.
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The Circumstance of Expectancy: Sara Gallardo’s January
From the early pages of the novel, she laments, “It’s a different story for rich girls, they have their ways,” which is a very elegant way of throwing one’s arms up and shouting that it isn’t fair to a world…
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Turning a White Savior Inside Out: A Conversation with Frank Santo
. . . There is a lot of horror and horrible things about it, but there is also a lot of grace and things that show how strong people can be. It’s really the whole gamut of humanity.
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“Wide-Leg Poems”: A Conversation with Cynthia Manick
Emotions don’t change, we all know love and joy. We all know pain. We all know “trying to find love.”
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A Mortal Education: Bernardo Zannoni’s My Stupid Intentions
In one of Solomon’s early lessons, he pushes Archy toward thoughts of his own mortality for the first time before offering religion as a solution to existential dread.
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“Speculative Fiction as a Survival Tool:” A Conversation with C Pam Zhang
Failure is an inevitable part of the process. The faster you get through your failure, the faster you’ll get to the end.
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The Antihero: A Conversation with Kim Foster
I had to change the parameters of what I thought success was. Success might be a plate of eggs with toast or a talk on the curb. Sometimes the most simple thing is the thing that makes the difference. I
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“Good Buy” to All That: Pip Adam’s The New Animals
It’s imaginative fiction in a way that is jolting to the auto-fiction that is so prevalent today, and it allows Adam to make commentary on the disasters of human ambition.