Tomorrow, to our delight, Lookout Books will publish Honey from the Lion, the debut novel of Matthew Neill Null. The novel travels the same West Virginian logging terrain as "The Slow Lean of Time," the stunner of a story we published in our Spring 2014 issue (if you would like to read that story, you can pick up a copy in our store; choose Issue 57 from among the back issues). Like "The Slow Lean of Time," Honey from the Lion employs a sweeping omniscient narration almost Victorian in its ... [READ MORE]
NOTEBOOK
Bourbon and Milk: Here Is the Essay, Now Where Is the Child?
Bourbon and Milk is an ongoing series that dives into the perplexing spaces parenting sometimes pushes us and explores the unexpected ways writers may grow in them. If you’re interested in joining the conversation or contributing a Bourbon and Milk post, query Giuseppe Taurino at giuseppe@americanshortfiction.org. “Where do you get so much energy?” I asked my daughter recently, the age-old parenting question. She was running around like on any other day while I sprawled supine on the ... [READ MORE]
Online Fiction Interview: Sofi Stambo
Sofi Stambo's "Ships" presents a vivid summer break on the Black Sea during which a young, unnamed protagonist pines for the son of the Tomov family, which is headed by a sea captain who lives across the street from her grandparents. It's a story so precise in its sensory details that it feels deeply familiar—and even nostalgic—in spite of its Bulgarian setting. We emailed Stambo recently to ask about those details, about Bulgaria during the communist years, and about what she's working on ... [READ MORE]
Things American: Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson and the Hell’s Angels at La Honda: August 7th, 1965
Fifty years ago today, Ken Kesey, not yet thirty and already the author of two acclaimed novels, invited the members of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang to a party at his home in the coastal mountains south of San Francisco. When the Angels arrived it was just past 3 p.m. A blue summer afternoon: Kesey and his Merry Pranksters—the friends who’d accompanied him, the year before, on the cross-country bus trip that would later become the subject Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test—watched ... [READ MORE]
Things American: Writers Remember James Salter
American novelist, story writer, and screenwriter James Salter died on June 19th, leaving behind a body of work that presents a vision of a century in dramatic motion. He was a writer of the quotidian and a craftsman of the first water whose interest in sensory experiences is most evident in his arresting narrative passages. Food, drink, sex, the seemingly impossible beauty of things touched, witnessed, and heard—these are rendered in precise and yet often surprising terms in Salter's work. In ... [READ MORE]
Online Fiction Interview: Hilary Leichter
Hilary Leichter's "The Statue of Limitations" plays by its own delightful set of rules. It's at once the story of a couple imprisoned in their own home (a statue marking the furthest that they can roam into their yard without the "risk of pursuit") and a parable for how intimacy ebbs and flows in a relationship. We recently emailed Leichter to ask how the story came about and to pick her brain about the odd eggcorn that inspired its creation. Nate Brown: This story does something ... [READ MORE]