In Ashley Whitaker’s hilarious, satirical, and at times devastating debut novel, Bitter Texas Honey, we follow Joan, a recent college graduate with an Adderall problem who wants nothing more than to be a writer. Her biggest obstacle? She’s plagued…
Essay by Abby Manzella • In Karen Babine’s latest memoir, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo (Milkweed 2025), the author preps her Scamp camper and drives from her home in Minnesota to the Acadian coast of…
On an early spring day in Flatbush, I sat down with my friend and neighbor, Shayne Terry. Our five-year-olds went out with their fathers while we talked about Terry’s debut book, Leave: A Postpartum Account, which came out this…
By Jen Craven • Here’s a truth many writers (myself included) sometimes resist: if your characters aren’t suffering, your story probably is. In the world of suspense fiction, suffering isn’t just dramatic flair—it’s fuel. It’s what cranks the tension,…
Poet, translator, memoirist, fiction writer, and visual artist Jesse Lee Kercheval’s recently released graphic memoir French Girl portrays seventeen episodes from throughout Kercheval’s life, rendered in vibrant color by Kercheval herself. It showcases the powerful immediacy of Kercheval’s twenty…
“In books you don’t usually get to know what the protagonists eat for each meal,” Sienna Liu’s narrator in Food Porn observes. “And because everything happens off-stage, whether those have been hot hearty meals or flimsy flippant meals is…
What does it mean to be “ruined a little when we are born”? Writer and engineer Tara Isabel Zambrano searches for the answer to that question in her newest collection of short stories, Ruined a Little When We Are…
In T. J. Martinson’s forthcoming novel, Her New Eyes, an experimental eye transplant with unexpected side effects upends the life of a sixty-eight-year-old florist living in modern-day Indiana. Soon after the procedure, the protagonist, Susan, begins receiving sporadic visions…
I had the pleasure of chatting with Annell López, author of the award-winning debut short story collection I’ll Give You a Reason over coffee after work in New Orleans, where we both live and write. I’ll Give You a…
Essay by Gabriel Moseley • I had the great pleasure of meeting Deborah Jackson Taffa at the Vermont Studio Center in October 2023, where she was the Visiting Writer. It was stick season—the dismal threshold between the time of…
