Features & Reviews
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Breaking the Fourth Wall: A Conversation with A.A. Vacharat
The story also engages with the emotional tensions arising from the anticipated return of ’Wayne’s long-absent mother, as well as the intricacies of the relationship between ’Wayne and his sometimes overly present father. Both relationships are portrayed with nuance and…
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Traversing the Bridge to Dystopia: A Conversation with Nini Berndt
Something changed substantially during COVID. Housing skyrocketed. Our unhoused population skyrocketed. The opiate crisis was in full display. My wife and our son and I were living in an un-air-conditioned apartment in Cap Hill and marching in the George Floyd…
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The First Book: Tennessee Hill
The process of querying agents was filled with no’s that, though sad, each felt like a gentle push in the right direction towards my eventual agent Elizabeth Pratt. Once Elizabeth and I teamed up, everything happened rapidly. She did so…
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Coming Out of Her Shell: A Conversation with Anelise Chen
Gregor Samsa went to bed a tired, overworked salesman and woke up as a giant cockroach. Anelise Chen’s own metamorphosis was nowhere near as drastic. Clam Down: A Metamorphosis (One World, 2025) is Chen’s exploration of what it would mean…
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Ultimately Unbounded: A conversation with Alina Ștefănescu
Mystic-heretic-philosopher-poet Alina Ștefănescu’s newest collection of poetry, My Heresies (Sarabande 2025) is a radiant skirmish of families and selfhood, countries and allegiances, rules and refusals, and the force with which fraught love (is there any other kind?) bends us to…
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The First Book: Daniel Tam-Claiborne
I began writing Transplants in earnest in 2019 during the last semester of my MFA program. I had the truly great fortune of working with Lauren Groff who, when given the option between helping me touch up my existing short…
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A Space of Her Own
Marcia LeBeau’s debut collection, A Curious Hunger, is a powerful testament to the unabashed wholeness of womanhood—and an assertion that our culture, where power skews cis male, needs to make space for it. All of it. This is a big…
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Take A Risk and Stand at The Edge of a Cliff: A Conversation with Jen Michalski
In her newest novel, All This Can Be True (Keylight Books, 2025), Michalski makes readers want to break out the black eyeliner and catch a show headlining (the excellently named) Clit Girls.
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Misperceptions, Assumptions, and Slurs: Jackie Domenus’s No Offense
Even when doing the work to figure ourselves out, even within the seemingly safest of spaces, we must grapple with how others contain and label us.
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Chaos Seeps Into Order: A Conversation with Maria Reva
If you can laugh about a difficult situation, laugh in your aggressor’s face, it gives you a sense of power.
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A Summertime Swoon Tash Aw’s The South
The relationship helps Jay achieve a sense of selfhood that promises to outlast the usual parameters of a summer romance. In a sense, he’s coming out to himself.
