Laskar’s debut novel imagines an alternate ending to an incident from her real life: When law enforcement agents raided her home, and confiscated her unfinished novel, what if she had refused to comply?
Fiction
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story
To Compromise With the Facts of Living
In Elizabeth McCracken’s new novel “Bowlaway,” the past and future are mysteriously entangled.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘I Spent Two Years Researching Before I Wrote a Single Line’: Geeking Out With Marlon James
Man Booker winner Marlon James immersed himself in African myths and history, so he could use that world as a springboard for a new fantasy series.
Posted inFiction, Highlight, Quotes
Did Your Walls Keep Them Out, or Lock You In?
Gabriela Garcia’s short story about a women fighting a cold war with her new neighbor is deeply political without explicitly being about politics at all.
Posted inFiction, Reading List
10 Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2019
Stories by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Min Jin Lee, and Saul Bellow.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story, Writing
Sam Lipsyte on ‘Mental Archery,’ the Quest for Certainty, and Where All the Money Went
“It’s difficult to say what you really think. You’re too aware of the traps, the dead ends, the cul-de-sacs of utterance: all the ways we let cliché steer us in a certain direction, force us to say not quite what we mean…”
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story
The Haväng Dolmen
A trip to a Swedish stone-age burial site gives an archaeologist too close a look at death.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘In a Marriage, You Grow Around Each Other’: An Interview with Tessa Hadley
Tessa Hadley on gaining the sense of authority she needed to write fiction, the authors whose work opens the door for her to write, and the way we are formed by our connections with other people.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story, Writing
Sarah Moss on Brexit, Borders, Bog Bodies, and the ‘Foundation Myths of a Really Damaged Country’
Sarah Moss’s tale of Iron Age reenactors and parental abuse is her way of addressing Brexit. “Putting the skulls of the ancestors up in some attempt to hold back history never works.”
Posted inBooks, Current Events, Essays & Criticism, Fiction, Story
Will Amazon Finally Kill New York?
A New Yorker reads “Seasonal Associate” in the age of HQ2.