Oxford American
-
By Accident and On Purpose: A Conversation with Leesa Cross-Smith
Leesa Cross-Smith discusses her debut novel, Whiskey & Ribbons, what it takes to return to a story after a long time away, and how her faith influences her writing.
-
This Week in Short Fiction
This week, Oxford American has a stand-alone excerpt from Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, her first novel since 2011’s National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones. The excerpt, titled “Flayed,” follows a boy named Jojo in the rural Mississippi Gulf Coast…
-
Making the Fantasy a Reality
It’s particularly pleasurable to read interview between writers who know each other well. Over at Oxford American, long-time friends Ada Limón and Manuel Gonzales discuss Gonzales’s new novel, The Regional Office Is Under Attack, and what it means to write…
-
Fiction Fitness
In Palmetto Landing, the men’s bodies existed in inverse proportion to those of their wives. Ahead of the publication of her much anticipated collection Difficult Women, out in January 2017, you can read Roxane Gay’s new short story “Group Fitness” over at Oxford…
-
Calling the Canon
Don’t miss Kaveh Akbar’s review of Olio, by Tyehimba Jess (Wave Books), for Oxford American: The characters cast in Olio’s poly-vocal swirl count no fewer than a dozen, and almost all of them are famous (or infamous) figures of the early…
-
Ponce de León, You Are Not the Forefather
Aside from a few shared scribbles of genetic code, it is difficult to say exactly what keeps us tethered to our distant ancestors. Over at Oxford American, Alex Mar thinks through the implications of incorporating these stories into our personal…
-
Fiction Can’t Be Any Worse Than Real Life
The Oxford American talks to John McManus about his new short story collection, Fox Tooth Heart, and how he feels about his fiction being called “depraved”: I don’t know what world people are living in where they find stories in…
-
The Rumpus Interview with Skip Horack
Skip Horack talks about his new novel, The Other Joseph, blending research with fiction, and living with the “curse of the fiction writer.”
-
Roots and Ragtime
John Jeremiah Sullivan and Joel Finsel chronicle the rise, fall, and in-between wanderings of Houstonian booksellers, civil rights activists, reporters, and musicians—in oversized, Texan fashion. Most people have heard of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, canonical English poet and laudanum addict. Far…
-
Merit Badges and Adolescent Angst
Over at the Oxford American, Rosecrans Baldwin treats us to a piece on America’s Boy Scouts. Also, adolescent angst: Any cool kids in my town whose parents enrolled them in Cub Scouts were gone by the time we were old enough…
-
Hands In Bleach
A classic Annie Dilliard-ism; “The way you spend your days/is the way you spend your life.” In the latest Oxford American, Southern poet Rebecca Gayle Howard—guest editor of the OA summer issue—talks about her writing process and how she spends her days:…
-
“How do we access what we cannot know?”
A book of poetry wrangling with your complicated Southern genealogy: this, by definition, is a complicated endeavor. The Forage House, Tess Taylor’s debut book of poetry, finds the author doing just that. The Oxford American talks to her about what that was like: A lot…