Sands Hall, a playwright and daughter of author Oakley Hall, digs into the work of Wallace Stegner — specifically his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Angle of Repose, which is based on the life of Mary Hallock Foote. “[W]e often fold in the real with the invented,” writes Hall, but when does inspiration become plagiarism? Yet in […]
novels
Posted inCommentary, Essays & Criticism, Featured, Highlight, Quotes
When Time Costs Too Much
If you are the family breadwinner, how do you calculate the value of time with your children?
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story
‘I’m a Big Fan of Writing To Find Out What You Don’t Know.’
Mark Haber discusses “Reinhardt’s Garden” and its protagonist’s quest for a true understanding of melancholy: “not a feeling but a mood, not a color but a shade, not depression but not happiness either…”
Posted inStory
‘I Was Interested in the People Who Are Stuck With These Memories.’
Steph Cha discusses her new novel “Your House Will Pay,” the LA Riots, the Korean American Angeleno community, her 3,600 Yelp reviews, and pushing back against gatekeepers in publishing.
Posted inStory
‘Writing This Book Was a Weird Séance ’: An Interview With Deborah Levy
“If you have the depth, the surface can be as light as it’s possible to make it…I don’t mind that ‘Swimming Home’ is sometimes described as a ‘beach read’ — actually that’s a triumph.”
Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Fiction, Story
Time To Kill the Rabbit?
In two new novels, the bunnies are anything but cute. (Unless … you use magic to turn one of them into a pre-TB Keats, or a talky Tim Riggins.)
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
Kristen Arnett on Taxidermy, Memory, and “Mostly Dead Things”
“What’s considered high art? What’s lowbrow? What are those things? That’s something that, as a person who like, lives at 7-Eleven, I’m extremely interested in.”
Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Fiction, Science & Nature, Story
High Expectations: LSD, T.C. Boyle’s Women, and Me
“Outside Looking In” dramatizes the discovery of LSD and the cult of personality surrounding Timothy Leary. Our reviewer drops acid and thinks about how, for women, it can be safer to be a downer.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘The Home Is a Place as Wild as Any in the World.’
Chia-Chia Lin talks about the wildness of domestic spaces and writing her novel “The Unpassing” through the early months of motherhood.
Posted inEditor's Pick, Essays & Criticism, Featured, Nonfiction, Unapologetic Women
Game of Crones
It wasn’t entirely Laura Lippman’s idea to become a mother in her 50s. But when it happened, she leaned in hard.