Clare Beams’s Bard Fiction Prize-winning story collection We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books, 2016) transports us to saltwater marshes that promise healing and schools that promise transformation (in more ways than one), to bodies in decay, tightly corseted, breaking apart, and numbed—worlds singularly strange yet incredibly, vibrantly real. Beams possesses an astonishing depth of imagination and clarity of vision, and she guides us compassionately through this collection that … [Read more...] about What We Have Learned: An Interview with Clare Beams
Novel
Editorial Outtake: American Pop by Snowden Wright
Editorial Outtakes is a series in which we publish excerpts from recent books that you won’t find anywhere else because, prior the publication, these sections were cut. This installment of Editorial Outtakes features a deleted scene from American Pop, the new novel by Atlanta-based author Snowden Wright. Published by Harper Collins earlier this week, the novel follows the Forster family, a clan whose fortune is made via patriarch Harold's famous Panola Cola Company. With their roots planted in … [Read more...] about Editorial Outtake: American Pop by Snowden Wright
Editorial Outtake: If You Leave Me
Editorial Outtakes is a series in which we publish excerpts from recent books that you won’t find anywhere else because, prior the publication, these sections were cut. This installment of Editorial Outtakes features an original chapter from Crystal Hana Kim's debut novel If You Leave Me. A moving story of love during wartime, the novel's poses difficult questions about whether it's better to choose security over love and safety over freedom. Here, Kim shares her thoughts—and an example of a … [Read more...] about Editorial Outtake: If You Leave Me
Strange New City: An Interview with Lucy Tan
Lucy Tan's debut novel What We Were Promised is a deftly constructed multiple-perspective work that tells the story of the Zhen household. After attaining educations and building careers in the United States, Wei and Lina return to Shanghai with their daughter, Karen, where they find themselves a part of a new generation of urban elites. Quite suddenly, Wei is tasked with dramatically expanding his business while Lina finds herself part of an upper-crust previously unimaginable to her. As a … [Read more...] about Strange New City: An Interview with Lucy Tan
Something to Rage Against: An Interview with James Han Mattson
In his beautiful debut novel, The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves, James Han Mattson explores the fallout from an act of violence that will seem all too familiar to American readers. Using multiple first-person narrators, Mattson deftly orbits the book's central tragedy, allowing readers a broad view of the event that does much more than explore a killer's motivations. Mattson's characters struggle to make sense of what's taken place in their town, and through multiple voices, multiple lines of … [Read more...] about Something to Rage Against: An Interview with James Han Mattson
Novelist of the Appetites: An Interview with Ashley Warlick
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