ANNOTATIONS, REVIEWS, and CRAFT BOOKS
Interview: Elvia Wilk
Elvia Wilk’s nonfiction debut, Death by Landscape (out July 19, 2022, via Soft Skull Press), investigates how we might displace human-centered narratives. Through literary immersion, research into spectral encounters and virtual reality, reflections on her own physicality, and first-person…
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Conversations Between Friends: Thea Prieto and Peg Alford Pursell
Thea Prieto and Peg Alford Pursell first became acquainted when Pursell submitted her hybrid flash writing to The Gravity of the Thing, a literary journal edited by Prieto, and over the years their conversations on writing have grown to…
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Interview: Lan Samantha Chang
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…
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Interview: Randon Billings Noble
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…
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The Semantics of Belonging: Asian American Identity and Cost of the American Dream in Ling Ma’s SEVERANCE
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…
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“Keeping to Eat”: Nourishment for the Literary Mind, Winter 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…
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Hybrid Interview: Cheryl Pappas
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…
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Art of the Opening: Tyler Barton
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…
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Shaping, Containing, and Dissecting Emotion in Kristen Radtke’s SEEK YOU
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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