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 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, 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.