The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “The Space of Things” by Jacinta Escudos
It’s often said that writers must be willing to be cruel to their characters, lest the story they tell lack drama or stakes. In “The Space of Things” (The Cossack Review), Jacinta Escudas (Translated by Samantha Memi) offers a different take on the cold realities of the writer/protagonist
Place Matters
I’ve been stoked for a number of novels this month, but maybe none as much as Chris McCormick’s Desert Boys. It’s his first collection, a series of linked stories. His progressions are thematic. The prose is lovely, and the guy seems like an ace—but more so than the subject
Review: DIMESTORE by Lee Smith
Hers is a voice that I will never tire of: encouraging, kind, and so forthright about the complexities inherent in life, specifically life lived as a writer, a woman, and a resident of a place that is experiencing the unpredictable transience of time, while also rooting itself in the
Origin Stories: Don DeLillo’s UNDERWORLD
Novelists, like paranoiacs, see connections where other people don’t, which is to say that both are always trying to uncover plots. Don DeLillo is a dean of both groups, so it’s fitting that his 1997 masterpiece, Underworld, is a conspiracy of people, events, and cultural touchstones (both real and
Waiting to Write
Like any writer I dream of being awarded a life-altering grant or winning the state lottery, or at the very least, the heart of some word-loving benefactor, a silver-haired sugar mama or daddy who’ll rescue me from hard labor, no strings attached, simply for the satisfaction of seeing my
Obama the Ellisonian: Another Reading of the President’s Worldview
Early in the speech that Barack Obama gave last year to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” standing in front of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama, the president asked, “What can be more American than what happened in this place?” That line deserved more attention than it
Conflict & Tension: What Writers Can Learn From How Visual Artists Use Contrast
Contrast is the visual artist’s most powerful tool. Contrast does not necessarily mean opposite. Evil and contentment, white and off-white are both contrasts, but they are not opposites. Artists use a spectrum of tools to achieve contrast: color and light, saturation and tone shading and line, focus, scale and
We miss out when US publishers lag behind in adopting global titles: an Interview with Jim Pascual Agustin
Why and when did you move from the Philippines to South Africa and how does one choose South Africa in particular? The quick answer would be because of a girl I met on holiday in the mountainous regions Philippines of the north. When I flew to South Africa on
Round-Up: Bookslut, BTBA Winners, and the Intersection of Poetry and Music
From Bookslut’s last issue to the important role poetry and music play in each other’s lives, here’s a look at the latest literary news: In March, founder of Bookslut Jessica Crispin announced she’d be stopping publication of the website, which she’s been running since 2002. She recently sat down with
When Parents Die: William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow and Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs
Last week my friend’s mother died, with brutal speed, of cancer. Ten years ago, my father died of a neurological disease so drawn out and cruel that we all wished for its end. Parents die, usually before their children, and so both of these deaths were inevitable in one