In his much-anticipated debut collection A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley lays bare the full and complex interiority of black men and boys kicking against all manner of inexorable truths, while living an inch from ruin in Brooklyn and the Bronx. With stunning clarity and generosity of detail, each of the nine stories leaves its own lasting impression, while the book as a whole coalesces into a devastating tapestry of confused masculinity, familial responsibility, and the intractable power of … [Read more...] about The Art of Staring: An Interview with Jamel Brinkley
Aaron Teel
Review: Elizabeth McCracken’s Thunderstruck and Other Stories
If, as George Saunders would have it, fiction is more interesting when death is in the room, then Thunderstruck and Other Stories, which won The Story Prize last week, is positively teeming with interest. Still, the various deaths and disappearances running through the nine meticulously crafted stories in Elizabeth McCracken’s moving and deeply cathartic collection could easily overwhelm if not for the charismatic force of her prose and darkly comic bedside manner. Where a lesser writer might … [Read more...] about Review: Elizabeth McCracken’s Thunderstruck and Other Stories
ASF Alumni: An Interview with Matt Bell
With two chapbooks, a short story collection and a novella in flash under his belt, Matt Bell has been quietly turning heads for years, accumulating acolytes and critical acclaim with his heady brand of visionary lyrical surrealism. Bell, along with the celebrated likes of Karen Russell, Aimee Bender, and Téa Obreht, is among a generation of young writers working far outside the bounds of mimesis to create a new kind of mythology more fully equipped to describe an increasingly absurd and … [Read more...] about ASF Alumni: An Interview with Matt Bell