By Patrick Thomas Henry • Wherever I write, I stow props: photographs and notebooks, found objects, mementoes of life away from the page. Despite my effort to shake off the strictures of my own workshop experiences, I still believe…
In The Family Chao, publishing today from W. W. Norton, Lan Samantha Chang presents a contemporary Midwestern family in fascinating crisis. I was fortunate to work with Sam in 2018 during the final semester of my MFA studies at…
As a writer and professor, I am often on the lookout for books on craft to expand my thinking when I write and to expand my explanatory powers when I teach. A new anthology edited by Randon Billings Noble…
Essay by Sam Risak • Author of a combined six books of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College, and president of the literary nonprofit Sweet: A Literary Confection, Ira Sukrungruang…
By Khushi Daryani • “Only in America do you have the luxury of being depressed,” claims Ruifang from Ling Ma’s Severance (Ma, 226). A recently resurfaced novel due to its uncanny similarity to the global pandemic, it contains several…
Essay by Kristin Tenor • There is a certain longing found within Cheryl Pappas’s debut flash fiction collection, The Clarity of Hunger. The sixteen pieces included in the collection, many previously published in well-established literary journals such as The…
From a distance, you can see the lights. The air is mosquito-thick, damp. The usually desolate backroads of Butler County, PA have become a caravan of motor enthusiasts. From the grassy shoulder, a deer struts with meticulous posture as…
By Stephanie Trott • I learned to love long-form graphic narratives during a time often associated with loneliness: college. Neither wunderkind nor department darling, I often felt an imposter in my undergraduate English classes and struggled to determine one…
Essay by Claire Lobenfeld • Alexandra Kleeman’s latest novel Something New Under the Sun is a book about plague. Not necessarily about sickness—although there is an age-agnostic form of dementia in its pages—but the Biblical kind. A novelist moves…
Robert Lopez’s fiction delves deep into those devastating moments which bring into question how it is we survive this strange, oftentimes volatile, experiment we call life. His characters are real people with real problems, many of them confused as…
