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.
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Posts Tagged: Oxford American
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 as he helps his grandfather kill and butcher a goat on his thirteenth birthday. Filled […]
...moreMaking 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 with an ear to the fantastical: When I first started writing, though, I was deep […]
...moreFiction 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 American.
...moreCalling 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 blues or ragtime canon. Reclamation is expressed through appropriation, echo, and poems that are often […]
...morePonce 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 narratives as she confronts the terrible deeds of her oft-claimed ancestor—the conquistador, Ponce de León. “This […]
...moreFiction 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 which bad things happen to be more depressing or depraved than real life.
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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.”
...moreRoots 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 fewer know the life and work of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Coleridge-Taylor was a black composer, London-born, his […]
...moreMerit 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 to level-up. It might’ve been because of the program between Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts: […]
...moreHands 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: For me the writing life is much like any trade work: one part apprenticeship and […]
...more“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 of these poems are a kind of anti-reporting. They’re a record of the places where […]
...morePicturing Appalachia
There’s a bite-sized symposium about the challenges of photographing Appalachia happening over at the Oxford American right now, and it’s a great read. In his essay, “Looking Without Fear,” Roger May writes: Recently, I was thinking about my grandfather and missing him a great deal. I decided to flip through his bible where, throughout the […]
...moreUltrarunning, Ultrawriting
The relationship between writing and running has a long history, so perhaps it’s not surprising to see a cluster of longreads having to do with ultrarunning. One is this New York Times Magazine profile of Kilian Jornet Burgada, “the most dominating endurance athlete of his generation,” who, judging by the article, seems to be some sort of […]
...morePANEL BUSTING: The Census
At Oxford American, Rumpus columnist Nick Rombes breaks into the official US census for 1860, chronicling his reaction to the text and the traces left behind by past readers. “Curled delicately, its oil having spread out in a bloom across the pages, the hair is part of a human body in a book about numbered […]
...moreAn Oxford American Update
Rumpus Essays Editor Roxane Gay recently posted about the troubling situation at the Oxford American in which Mark Smirnoff, the founding editor of the Oxford American, and managing editor Carol Ann Fitzgerald were fired amidst hushed circumstances, linking to Smirnoff’s deeply personal and detailed account of his ouster. Yesterday The New York Times ran a […]
...moreLit Link Love
We’re excited to be included on Oxford American’s recommended links page! Thanks, Oxford American. We love you back!
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All We Read Is Freaks
Who says that here, in the land of fluorescent signs, football mania, booming bass, and a Mouse with a compulsion to celebrate itself every few hours, a poet can’t still strike a nerve?
...moreThe Freelance Life
The latest issue of the Oxford American includes their annual “Best of the South” package, but it’s also got an essay on the struggles of freelancing, a subject that knows no geographical bounds. For almost 20 years, Thomas Swick edited his newspaper’s travel section, freelancing a couple of books along the way. After getting laid […]
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