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     |  I think the key to staying in one place is to remember that the most important things in a novel are story, story, and story. This means that you are stuck with not explaining the action by referring to other places or other times, but seeing what the characters can do, right where they are, to advance a story. Continue reading Interview with Craig Nova  JE: We love the spirit of independence around here, and it gives us great pleasure to cover indie releases that may not have the benefit of 100k print runs, and deep publicity coffers, books that won’t get waterfront placement in the chains, titles you aren’t likely to read about in People Magazine, but you might, with a little luck, and some word of mouth, see on staff picks and book club walls and blogs across America. So, I hit up every indie editor I know (every one of whom is way cool), and I asked them each to preview a title or three from their upcoming spring list. This is a really exciting, and startlingly diverse list of titles which Continue reading 3G1B Spring Indie Preview  For me, discovering Faulkner had the pacing of a summer romance. I found him one June and couldn’t think of much else until September. But if our introduction had the timing of a fling, it had the texture of a break-up: our weeks together were marked by chronic feelings of loss and loneliness. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Leslie Jamison  I was a strange little girl. Nuns handled my education at a place called Gate of Heaven School in Back Mountain,Pennsylvania, a locale firmly fixed in the middle of nowhere. I attended daily morning mass and afternoon classes in all things Catholic. Every Friday we had weekly confession. My reading centered around sacred texts supplemented by trips with my mother to the Hoyt Public Library. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Lorraine Adams  I waited for hours while my friend Rob was being diagnosed by non-English speaking doctors for the strange rash that had just turned him into Two Face. Puss-ridden sores and a rosy crust had totally painted the left side of his face over the previous 48 hours, but the right side was untouched. He was told he needed brain surgery and would have to be sent back to Ireland for that. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – John Dermot Woods  Then I fell in love with a woman who grew up on the Cape Flats, the sprawling mixed-race ghetto that is home to more than two-thirds of Cape Town’s population, and the stories she told me and the people she introduced me to changed my vision of Cape Town forever. Continue reading Interview with Roger Smith  In the middle of last year I came upon a great collection of short stories from Steven Amsterdam; Things We Didn’t See Coming. I jumped on it and tried to get the word out early with a series of story reviews. It’s in the stores now, and Mr. Amsterdam is out on an author tour. Continue reading Steven Amsterdam  Soldiers inhabit an environment where violent death in youth is nearer than it is for most of the rest of us. In that way they’re like cops, criminals, emergency room staff or the severely impoverished. Like those groups of people, they develop their own argot. It’s a logical outgrowth of their constant encounters with extremity. They need to invent words to get at what is rarely described by others living more commonly experienced lives. One of the singularities of the female soldier in my novel, a fighter pilot, is that because of recent changes in warfare, she is far more insulated from combat death than fighter pilots in previous wars. Yet she is at the nexus of one of the most serious moral dilemmas of today’s wars–civilian casualties from aerial attack. Continue reading Interview with Lorraine Adams  The issue of social class is certainly at play in the book. Americans like to think they live in a classless society but of course we don’t. Doug and Charlotte are both deeply imprinted by the class in which they grew up. They both have prejudices born of that experience. And some of their mutual animosity stems from that difference. Continue reading Interview with Adam Haslett  I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The book was huge, over 900 pages, and the cover looked like a T-shirt from the seventies: bubble letters shooting toward you on psychedelic beams of light, as if being projected from some nether region of space. And that’s what the stories inside felt like to me: alien dispatches that were just now reaching Earth. They were dark and freaky and often had savage little twists at the end. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Eric Puchner  I was an ex-jock slash bouncer slash carpenter getting my guts up to actually admit to friends, family and drinking buds that I wanted to be a writer. Yeah I know that sounds bad. Where I come from in north east Ohio saying shit like that would pretty much be the beginning of a lifetime of ‘here comes the queer’ looks followed by some smart ass comment like, “Hey, it’s Ernest fucking Hemingfag.” You might as well announce you wanted to take up ballet or puppeteering. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Elwood Reid  Books were spectators at my house, lining the walls of every room, an audience peering down on my childhood: books as thick as my thigh and books as thin as my finger, books on gardening and books on Hitler, books about the brain and books about pain, books featuring hippos and books without any hippos at all. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Tom Rachman |  | ||
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