Tag: fiction

In the midst of the Syrian Civil War, three grown siblings attempt to fulfill their father’s final wish. The journey is dangerous, but that’s no surprise; nowadays, death is always hard work.

In Scapellato’s new novel, a man is pulled into a noir detective mystery he doesn’t want to solve.

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?

In Elizabeth McCracken’s new novel “Bowlaway,” the past and future are mysteriously entangled.

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.

“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…”

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.

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.”

No longer able to live on her freelance writing income, German novelist Heike Geissler takes a holiday seasonal job at an Amazon fulfillment center.

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.

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.

Glory Edim talks about editing her new anthology, the push for equity in publishing, and how black women writers have written themselves into spaces that neglect or ignore them.

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.

Barbara Kingsolver takes a rigorous, scientific approach to her novels’ subjects — but, as a woman writer, her authority is often challenged.

Roxane Gay writes about the necessary and inevitable influence of politics on literature at this fraught time in history.

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.

A woman who doesn’t feel like going to work today stays in bed and looks at the internet instead. She finds a blog by a fed-up call center employee who complains about the customers.

In Ling Ma’s “Severance” — a novel she began to write after getting laid off, while living partly on severance pay — the characters keep going to work, even though they know it’s the end of the world.

“When I write, I’m creating a character, and then I’m just performing that character, and typing what they say.”

The first page was blank. On the second page, in an almost illegible calligraphic script, was written “Manifesto for a House in the Sky.”

To this day, when my mother is driving a car, she will only use the blinkers to indicate that she’s turning at the last second — just so that people behind her don’t know where she’s going.

Leaning in doesn’t work in real life. When I was writing, I kind of hoped that it would. I think I hoped that the answers are always within me. And when I reached the end of the book, it was like: there are no answers.

Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy is the embodiment of concept that the personal is political, even (especially?) in her fiction.

A forester’s daughter spends a night in a cabin in Soviet Russia, but it takes decades to discover how much danger she put her family in.

Many of us can viscerally remember what it was like to be young and overwhelmed by the power of our youth.

The author on his writing process and what it was like to watch a film based on one of his books.

Jason Diamond analyzes his obsession with Vintage Contemporaries paperbacks from the 80s.

In this short story, the children of Chinese miners in the frontier West struggle to survive after their parents’ death.

Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about how ghosts and authors of fiction share a similar role in today’s culture.

In Don Waters’ short story “Full of Days,” a grieving Las Vegas man uses an anti-abortion billboard to justify his own pained existence.