“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…”
fiction
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 inEditor's Pick
What it Felt Like When ‘Cat Person’ Went Viral
A personal essay in which Kristen Roupenian writes about the experience of having “Cat Person” — her fictional short story about a young woman who goes through with sex she’d rather not have at the end of a bad date, published in the New Yorker in 2017 — go viral, become the subject of much […]
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, Fiction, Story, Uncategorized
Seasonal Associate
No longer able to live on her freelance writing income, German novelist Heike Geissler takes a holiday seasonal job at an Amazon fulfillment center.
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.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story
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, Profiles & Interviews, Story
Celebrating a Profound Literary Inheritance: Glory Edim on the Well-Read Black Girl Anthology
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.
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, 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.