From the forthcoming collection Stay Awake. Death hangs around Brandon like a necklace. People die, and that’s what defines this story, but it seems to me that this is more about Brandon’s inability to accept death as a part of life.…
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I don’t need to tell anyone who has read it, but Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterwork, The Master and Margarita, is one of the seminal reading experiences of anyone’s life.…
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Matt Norman is the author of the amazing, Domestic Violets, just out from Harper Perennial. I am happy to provide you with our most recent conversation: JR: So you wrote a novel, good for you.…
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Jane Gardam says somewhere in Crusoe’s Daughter that a writer’s discovery of a great character is a divine accident. Perhaps in Polly Flint, the lead character in CD, Gardam imagined someone as intelligent and resourceful as herself but fictionally stranger.…
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One think-tank book that has been under the radar is The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford. You come across the ideas in smart journals of opinion; I think that will increasingly be true; but in most commercial media, the deep sources of creative thought are usually obscured to give more legitimacy to the middlemen.…
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From I Am an Executioner: Stories by Rajesh Parameswaran Knopf, 2012 Gopi isn’t what he wants to be, and life has done nothing to help him. …
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The finalists for this year’s Story Prize are The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo (Scribner), We Others by Steven Millhauser (Knopf), and Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman (Lookout Books).…
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From Further Interpretations Of Real-Life Events: Stories by Kevin Moffett Harper, March 2012 Death arrives, predictably or not to Dora’s father.…
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New York Diaries is edited by Teresa Carpenter who has done an excellent, sensitive job. The form is mathematically elegant and, I would think, an editor’s dream.…
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From Further Interpretations Of Real-Life Events: Stories by Kevin Moffett Harper, March 2012 Fathers and sons write about each other all the time.…
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JE: It’s no secret around here that I’ve long been a big fan of Stewart O’Nan....
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Dan Barden is the author of The Next Right Thing, a kind of fresh spin on something like a West Coast mystery or suspense novel, coming in March from Dial Press.…
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from I Am an Executioner: Love Stories by Rajesh Parameswaran Knopf, 2012 I don’t believe animals can talk, and any writer who writes a story about one that does, is pulling my leg.…
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Just in time to miss the holidays, I have in my hands, The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, from hitREcord and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.…
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