ANNOTATIONS, REVIEWS, and CRAFT BOOKS
Shaping, Containing, and Dissecting Emotion in Kristen Radtke’s SEEK YOU: A JOURNEY THROUGH AMERICAN LONELINESS
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…
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Hybrid Interview: Alexandra Kleeman
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…
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Interview: Robert Lopez
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…
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“Keeping to Eat”: Nourishment for the Literary Mind, Fall 2021
In Montréal, the newlyweds delay the satisfaction of my hunger. The duo drifts forward down Rue Saint-Sulpice, not more than one hundred steps outside the Notre-Dame Basilica with its archways and neon blues and vaulted ceilings tumbling with 24-karat gold…
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Interview: Pik-Shuen Fung
Pik-Shuen Fung’s Ghost Forest was first a visual artwork that evolved into a manuscript, which then became her debut novel. The story is a lyrical and tender one written in vignettes about a daughter grieving her father. The unnamed…
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Classics in the Maze: Michael Ende’s THE MIRROR IN THE MIRROR: A LABYRINTH
utque ope virginea nullis iterata priorum ianua difficilis filo est inuenta relecto —Ovid, Metamorphoses Das stammt alles aus anderen Zeiten. —Michael Ende, Der Spiegel im Spiegel. Ein Labyrinth Essay by Tamara Beneyto • Writer Michael Ende is mainly…
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Hybrid Interview: Matt Bell
Essay by Jesse Motte • Matt Bell’s new novel, Appleseed, explores the climate-disaster subgenre through an interlocking system of storytelling whereby myth, legend, and Bell’s own originality converge. The novel follows three characters as they navigate the spaces between…
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Flesh and Blood Ideas in J.M. Coetzee’s ELIZABETH COSTELLO
By Maggie Kast • When I’ve given a character my own thoughts on a subject close to my heart, I’ve heard critiques of my writing like, “Sounds authorial,” or, “Your character wouldn’t say that—those are your ideas.” Explication by…
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The Second Iceberg Theory
By Matthew Duffus • Every fiction writer I know is familiar with Ernest Hemingway’s “Iceberg Theory,” explained most succinctly in Death in the Afternoon, his nonfiction book on bullfighting: “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he…
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“Keeping to Eat”: Nourishment for the Literary Mind, Summer 2021
In Montréal, the newlyweds delay the satisfaction of my hunger. The duo drifts forward down Rue Saint-Sulpice, not more than one hundred steps outside the Notre-Dame Basilica with its archways and neon blues and vaulted ceilings tumbling with 24-karat…
Read More