ANNOTATIONS, REVIEWS, and CRAFT BOOKS
Women of Conscience: On Alice Mattison
By Leena Soman Navani • Alice Mattison has published a poetry collection, seven novels, four short story collections, and a book about writing fiction. She began her writing career more than five decades ago. Professionally, perhaps the only thing…
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Art of the Opening: Melissa Ragsly
In a 2015 review in The Los Angeles Times, the late Pulitzer Prize–winning restaurant critic Jonathan Gold describes an amuse-bouche at Le Comptoir in Koreatown as “a course that takes a cook 10 minutes to plate and that you…
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Hybrid Interview: Madeline ffitch
By Candace Walsh • “We live in a world that has unconstrained wildness, and we like to forget we are part of that wildness,” says Madeline ffitch, author of PEN/Hemingway Award–finalist Stay and Fight. Fiction that only acknowledges characters’…
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Nonstop Oracle: Everlastingness in Rachel Cusk’s OUTLINE
By Mark Gozonsky • 1 My favorite books explore the contours of the narrator’s brain, and I’ve never read anything that does this so well as Rachel Cusk’s Outline. I first encountered the striking cover image on the windowsill…
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Interview: Sarah Rose Etter
In her debut novel, The Book of X (Two Dollar Radio, July 2019), Sarah Rose Etter explores fear and femininity through the character of Cassie, a girl who was born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a…
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Celebrating SANTA FE NOIR
The following is excerpted from “The Sandbox Story,” by Candace Walsh, included in the anthology Santa Fe Noir, ed. Ariel Gore. Used with permission of the author and Akashic Books. I work at home, but my office has its…
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Hybrid Interview: Garth Greenwell
By Nicole Barney • Garth Greenwell’s second novel, Cleanness, revisits the territory of his debut, fleshing out the experiences of the narrator beyond those of his encounters with Mitko, a young man he meets in a public bathroom and…
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Ugly Love: Character as Plot in Mary Gaitskill’s DON’T CRY
By Melissa Benton Barker • The stories in Mary Gaitskill’s collection Don’t Cry are like tiny mirrors held close, all the pores and blemishes of her characters offered up for the readers’ inspection. Published in 2009, the collection scrupulously…
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Hybrid Interview: Dustin M. Hoffman
By Jesse Motte • When I read Dustin M. Hoffman’s first collection, One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist, during undergrad, it felt like I’d been suddenly gut-shot by some invisible, benevolent entity. The shock excited me. I prefer my writing like that: unforgiving…
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Repetition and Evolution: Structure in Robert Boswell’s CROOKED HEARTS
By Amber Wheeler Bacon • In the third draft of my novel, I’m still messing with structure. It feels like I’ll always be messing with structure. To experiment, I’ve tried copying the frameworks of different novels I love: Purity…
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