Interview: Lara Ehrlich
The woman on the cover of Lara Ehrlich’s debut short story collection appears to be almost airlifted from the 1950s—she could be an actor from The Donna Reed Show or perhaps a model for LOOK magazine, all aproned and…
Author: Guest Author
Nonfiction Explosions: THE BEST OF BREVITY
By Jacqueline Doyle • Flash fiction has gradually come to be recognized as an important literary form, though there are still writers who dismiss flash as a passing fad, less important than the short story. Often, they are the…
Interview: Joyce Hinnefeld
Stories that Slip Sideways: An Interview with Joyce Hinnefeld by Ron MacLean Joyce Hinnefeld and Ron MacLean met as fellow doctoral students in the English Department at SUNY Albany in the early 1990s. They’ve stayed in touch since then,…
Blood and Agency in Raven Leilani’s LUSTER
By Candace Walsh • Raven Leilani’s Luster is a craft and theme kaleidoscope, every turned page yielding a new configuration of angles and juxtapositions. What happens in this novel—twenty-three year old Edie, a Black woman artist manquée working slackly…
Hybrid Interview: Matthew Salesses
Essay by Candace Eros Diaz • The first sentence of Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World reads, “[T]his book is a challenge to accepted models of craft and workshop, to everything from a character-driven plot to the ‘cone…
More than Mere Oblivion: Alexander Trocchi’s CAIN’S BOOK
By Peter Selgin • Like rock stars, some novelists are eaten alive by their ardent fans. Embraced by severely circumscribed subcultures, their best performances are transformed from works of art into manifestoes, and cease to be read by ordinary…
Lessons from Julia Otsuka’s WHEN THE EMPEROR WAS DIVINE
By Kim Lozano • I’m a slow reader. I sometimes pluck a book from the shelf based not on whether its subject matter appeals to me, but whether or not it’s skinny or fat. So when I recently read…
When Everything Is Too Big, Write Small: Grounding in Micro Memoir
By Deirdre Danklin • In the morning, the cat puts her nose on my nose and meows. My husband gets up, feeds her, and makes oatmeal. I stare at the ceiling and don’t think anything. Then it’s: Get up, brush…
Hybrid Interview: Tara Isabel Zambrano
Essay by Kristin Tenor • Virginia Woolf writes in her novel Orlando: A Biography: “Nothing thicker than a knife blade separates happiness from melancholy.” Perhaps the same might be said by the characters inhabiting Tara Isabel Zambrano’s debut short…
A Closer Look: GOING SHORT
By Amy Barnes • Nancy Stohlman’s bio reads: Writer, Professor, Performer. Her new craft book, Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction, explores aspects of flash fiction including inspiration, writing, editing, workshopping, the form, collections, and an index of…