fbpx
>

Exploring the art of prose

Menu

ANNOTATIONS, REVIEWS, and CRAFT BOOKS

Art of the Opening: Melissa Ragsly

April 7, 2020

  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…

Read More

Hybrid Interview: Madeline ffitch

March 24, 2020

  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’…

Read More

Nonstop Oracle: Everlastingness in Rachel Cusk’s OUTLINE

March 17, 2020

  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…

Read More

Interview: Sarah Rose Etter

March 10, 2020

  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…

Read More

Celebrating SANTA FE NOIR

March 3, 2020

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…

Read More

Hybrid Interview: Garth Greenwell

January 28, 2020

  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…

Read More

Ugly Love: Character as Plot in Mary Gaitskill’s DON’T CRY

January 21, 2020

  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…

Read More

Hybrid Interview: Dustin M. Hoffman

December 17, 2019

  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…

Read More

Repetition and Evolution: Structure in Robert Boswell’s CROOKED HEARTS

December 10, 2019

  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…

Read More

Hybrid Interview: Cathy Ulrich

November 19, 2019

  By Kate Finegan • The Pieces Left Behind In Cathy Ulrich’s debut flash fiction collection, Ghosts of You (Okay Donkey Press, 2019), the murdered lady sets the plot in motion. These forty stories are all named in the same…

Read More