No longer able to live on her freelance writing income, German novelist Heike Geissler takes a holiday seasonal job at an Amazon fulfillment center.
Fiction
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
Guy Gunaratne on the ‘Push-Pull of Ancestry and Meaning’ in London
Guy Gunaratne’s Man Booker-longlisted “In Our Mad and Furious City” recognizes multiple, overlapping versions of London and its inhabitants, examining the ways violence can bubble up through the city’s fissures.
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Did the Modern Novel Kill Charles Bovary?
Jean Améry, the Austrian essayist and Primo Levi’s former barrack-mate at Auschwitz, wrote one last novel before he died. Its six angry chapters are written as if by Charles Bovary, accusing Flaubert of ruining his life.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
The Need for Distance: Jaclyn Gilbert on Writing and Running
For author Jaclyn Gilbert, revising her writing is much like doing the same running loops over and over, to the point where she doesn’t have to think about where she’s going anymore.
Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Fiction, Story
A Mysterious Crack Appears: Past Trauma and Future Doom Meet in “Friday Black”
In Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s fantastical short story collection, the strangest fantasy of all is that people try to act morally in a corrupt world.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story
The Hospital Where
When accompanying his father to the emergency room, a writer reflects on how he developed his talent — and why that’s a story he can never tell his father.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
Sarah Perry on ‘Melmoth,’ Monsters, and Making Her Readers Feel Responsible for Mass Atrocity
“It was important to me that the ‘villains’ in the book were ordinary people, because readers are ordinary people, and people who do terrible things are often ordinary people.”
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story, Writing
‘I’ve Always Been Either Praised or Accused of Ambition’: An Interview with Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver takes a rigorous, scientific approach to her novels’ subjects — but, as a woman writer, her authority is often challenged.
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The New Feeling
When Eleanor takes a break from reading the news, her laptop goes missing. Full of self-abnegation, she asks Wallace Shawn for advice.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Science Fiction, Story, Uncategorized
Putting a New Stone on the Grave: Sjón Brings the Golem to Iceland
Sjón’s “CoDex 1962” is the fulfillment of a pact he made with the Maharal of Prague in the Old Jewish Cemetery almost three decades ago.