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We didn’t hear the detective knock. Freddy was reading in his room. I was almost done working on a new painting in my studio, a figurative experiment, though it was getting too dark to see anything clearly. When no one answered the door, the detective walked along the side of the house and tapped on…
Brooke Shaffner’s Country of Under tackles the social issues that shape identity and belonging. Immigration is the novel’s heartbeat, propelling its main characters, two misfit teens named Pilar and Río, into situations that ultimately help them to better understand themselves in relation to the immigration-related struggles that have shaped their lives. The teens have everything…
Reading a book about reading books is like entering a hall of mirrors: the experience is at once fascinating and disturbing. Like other stories about books and writing, The Book Censor’s Library drags the reader into itself, claiming to be one kind of book but unexpectedly (and imperceptibly) turning into another. Even the title throws…
To call prose cinematic is often to imply that its descriptions are heavily visual, focused on surfaces more than interiorities, and rich with sweeping panoramas, vivid colors, and dramatic action. Not here. While thoroughly cinematic, the forty-four stories in Terese Svoboda’s The Long Swim are shaped by techniques of the editing room more than the…
Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, William Walsh writes about The Poets from Erratum Press. + Samuel Taylor Coleridge identified four kinds of readers: I am all four kinds of reader, and, I suppose, all four kinds…
How might a woman writer in Gilded-Age Boston break free from the authorial identity fashioned by her publisher and take control over not just her writing but her life? Virginia Pye’s The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann is, at its core, a novel that centralizes women’s creative labor. Born Victoria Meeks and re-christened by her…
It is worth noting the absence of a question mark in the title of Jody Hobbs Hesler’s debut collection, What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better. These stories do not ask sarcastically or bitterly why we feel entitled to feel better. Rather, the collection explores surprising moments that do offer a possibility of…