Barbara Kingsolver takes a rigorous, scientific approach to her novels’ subjects — but, as a woman writer, her authority is often challenged.
fiction
Posted inArts & Culture, Essays & Criticism, Highlight, Nonfiction, Unapologetic Women
Of Politics and Prose
Roxane Gay writes about the necessary and inevitable influence of politics on literature at this fraught time in history.
Posted inEditor's Pick
What Does a Political Story Look Like in 2018?
An essay in which Roxane Gay reveals how she chose the short stories for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2018 — with an eye toward writing that engaged with the political in thoughtful, engaging, diverse and inclusive ways.
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.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story
Army of Me
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.
Posted inBooks, Profiles & Interviews, Science Fiction, Story
Working Through the Apocalypse: An Interview with Ling Ma
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.
Posted inBooks, Profiles & Interviews, Story, Writing
I Would Never Say That, But the Character, He Said It: An Interview with Catherine Lacey
“When I write, I’m creating a character, and then I’m just performing that character, and typing what they say.”
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story
The Word ‘Hole’
The first page was blank. On the second page, in an almost illegible calligraphic script, was written “Manifesto for a House in the Sky.”
Posted inBooks, Profiles & Interviews, Story
How Women Survive the World: An Interview with Ingrid Rojas Contreras
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.
Posted inEditor's Pick
My Brother Comes to Moscow
An excerpt from Keith Gessen’s new novel, A Terrible Country, in which two very different brothers argue over the care of their aging grandmother. “We had had many arguments, but he was my brother; he had always been my brother.”