September 24, 2019
Inviting Invention: A Craft Roundtable with Chen Chen, Ángel García, and Bayo Ojikutu
This post is the eleventh in a months-long series that explores the topic of craft: what it is, how it has evolved, who has historically had access to it, and […]
July 30, 2019
A Hunger and a Need: An Interview with Neil Aitken and Dao Strom, Founders of De-Canon
This post is the fourth in a months-long series that explores the topic of craft: what it is, how it has evolved, who has historically had access to it, and […]
July 24, 2019
Organic Choreography: An Interview with Jane Alison, Author of Meander, Spiral, Explode
This post is the third in a months-long series that explores the topic of craft: what it is, how it has evolved, who has historically had access to it, and […]
July 12, 2019
So That’s How You Do It: An Interview with Michael Noll, Author of The Writer’s Field Guide to the Craft of Fiction
This post is the second in a months-long series that explores the topic of craft: what it is, how it has evolved, who has historically had access to it, and […]
March 25, 2019
On A TALE OF FOUR DERVISHES by Mir Amman
Amman, Mir. A Tale of Four Dervishes. Translated from the Urdu with an Introduction by Mohammed Zakir. Penguin Classics (India), 1994. 158 pages. Continuing my exploration of Penguin India’s […]
January 29, 2018
An Interview with Rachel Lyon
In Self-Portrait With Boy, Rachel Lyon has written a powerful debut novel. Self-Portrait examines the aftermath of the moment Lu Rile takes a photograph that inadvertently captures a boy’s fatal […]
January 17, 2018
An Interview with Naima Coster
Naima Coster’s debut novel, Halsey Street, examines critical issues such as gender, gentrification, anger, and art making. Recently Coster wrote a thoughtful, important essay on the significance of having a […]
October 26, 2017
Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties: The Mad Woman in the Attic and the Abject-Mother-Baby-in-the-Basement
Although not all the stories in Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties reach the accumulative electricity of its first tale, “The Husband Stitch,” this is not uncommon in […]
July 27, 2017
Writing the Great American Novel Amid Breast Augmentation Ads
There’s this breast augmentation ad on the subway where this woman’s holding oranges over her chest and looking sad in the lefthand picture and grapefruits over her chest and looking […]
August 29, 2016
‘Is that real?’: an interview with Justin Sanders
A few weeks back, I wrote about the work of emerging writer Justin Sanders. Here, Sanders takes some time to answer questions about truth and fiction, higher education, influence, and Baltimore. I’ve […]
January 31, 2016
The Happiness Game: On Yael Hadaya’s “Housebroken” (Part 2)
“The Happiness Game,” the second story in Housebroken, is my favorite of the three novellas. While the idea of a happiness game is a universal paradox, it is also quintessentially an Israeli one. […]
January 25, 2016
I Wanted to Ruin It for You: On Yael Hedaya’s Housebroken (Part 1)
Do you remember that strangely addictive taste of drugstore lipstick on your teenage lips And how it wouldn’t taste the same if you bit right into it? But […]