Ashley Warlick spent ten years on her latest novel, The Arrangement, a fictional retelling of the life and loves of famed food writer MFK Fisher. With lush, clean prose and pitch-perfect dialogue, Warlick lays bare the many appetites of a woman and writer ahead of her time. The novel spans the early years of Fisher’s career, a period marked by profound hunger as well as conflicting desires—for food, for recognition, for her husband Al and, later, for Al’s best friend, Tim. The book came out in … [Read more...] about Novelist of the Appetites: An Interview with Ashley Warlick
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Things American: In the Air, Election Night 2016
My ears won’t pop, and the bites on my right arm itch, my arm and neck—red flares I can’t ascribe to any particular predator, just marks of Texas. I get a second tiny bottle of whiskey. My taller-than-me daughter sleeps against my shoulder, too old these days, too grown up. We are over the Rockies, Denver to Helena, a tiny plane half full. I get the second whiskey because the flight attendant asks if I want another before she closes out her till. No flight attendant has ever asked me this. I … [Read more...] about Things American: In the Air, Election Night 2016
Choose Your Own
Section A You are sitting in the bedroom of a house that is inches away from the freeway. Cars whiz past at an alarming rate, and it seems to you that a minor slip of the steering wheel will send a car crashing into the bedroom, killing the occupants of the house. You are there on a date with the man who lives there, a man named Oswald. He complains that the highway was built too close to his house, taking away his front yard—you see the tiny blades of grass that are left of it, so few … [Read more...] about Choose Your Own
The Five Star Hotel of Bangkok
Everyone laughed about its name. In the 90s, the old concrete building had been a brothel, but it was now owned by a dreadlocked Israeli living out his dream of running a cut-rate hostel-cum-bar. For 100 baht, you rented a cinderblock room in one of the top three floors, a little box with exposed electrical wires and fluorescent lighting that flickered like life was quivering out of the tubes every time a semi clattered past. For 150 baht, the Israeli rented you a mattress. Nightly, the first … [Read more...] about The Five Star Hotel of Bangkok
The Tobacconist
George searched his pockets for change, cluttering the counter with lint and pen caps, a crumpled tissue, pausing to clean his glasses while the tobacconist waited at the open register. It was the tobacconist he cared about, not the neatly lined cigars he had thumbed through moments earlier. George could see the smoke shop from his kitchen window, and last week had watched the tobacconist as he emerged and stood on the street corner in a pouring rain, until his coat was drenched through and rain … [Read more...] about The Tobacconist