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Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, Chris Tusa’s second novel, In the City of Falling Stars (Livingston Press, September 2016), tells a tale of paranoia and intrigue. Maurice Delahoussaye witnesses dead birds falling from the sky, and becomes convinced the air is toxic. With equal parts humor and depravity, the novel chronicles a fractured family amidst a […]
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I first met Maggie Shipstead in 2011 when she was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She had not yet published her first novel, Seating Arrangements, which would later become a New York Times bestseller, but even then the magnitude of her ambition, shrewdness, and intellectual generosity was evident. After her first book debuted in […]
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Laurie Sheck is the author, most recently, of Island of the Mad, and A Monster’s Notes, a re-imagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry for The Willow Grove, she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and at the […]
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Steven Schwartz’s new book, Madagascar: New and Selected Stories, positively aches (often sighs, sometimes chuckles) with wisdom. Steven understands people. He understands why they do what they do, how they feel when they’ve done it, and he understands too how the twists of life can disrupt all of that so people act in peculiar, unexpected […]
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A tranquil beach town named Jarmuli is the setting of Anuradha Roy’s third novel, Sleeping on Jupiter, which won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and made the longlist for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Four older women travel as friends in search of a bucolic vacation, and a young woman, contending with the […]
...moreI first met Amy Dupcak at The Book Report Network in 2011, where she was an editorial assistant and I, a marketing assistant. We’d shoot off AOL Instant Messages to one another smirking over our computer screens, and leave simultaneously to take lunch. In the summertime, we’d cross Columbus Circle into Central Park where we’d […]
...moreHi there! We’re the two brunettes who hate sex. Sara-Kate hates sex because it’s too aerobic—she once sprained her foot. She lives in Kips Bay, loves candy, and wears exclusively rompers. Elisa Jordana hates sex because she abhors the human penis and all its functions. Not a fan of balls, either. She lives on the […]
...moreI met one of my favorite writers before she ever published a single story. We were classmates vying for our MFAs in Creative Writing from Florida International University and would smile at each other from across the room. She was shy, but never defensive, in workshop and always strove, really made the effort, to answer […]
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Donald Ray Pollock has been steadily serving up plates of mild horror since his first book of short stories, Knockemstiff, appeared in 2008. Pollock followed the explosion of Knockemstiff with The Devil All the Time, in 2011, his first novel, which also bordered on the genre of mystery, again with generous servings of darkness. His […]
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