Doing our best since 2009
In the spring of 2023, I was working diligently through the second semester of my MFA. Every three weeks, I sent my advisor a new packet of work, containing a short story or two, a craft essay, and a letter.
I first met Bradley Sides at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was showcasing his short story collection Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood (Montag Press, 2024). We soon discovered our shared loves of magic in fiction and southern literature, and Bradley impressed me with his generous spirit. Those same themes–magic,…
I wanted to review Book of Hours by Ellen O’Connell Whittet not because I am a mother—I am not—but because I am a medievalist. I was curious to see how the author incorporated the lives of medieval female saints into a story of a modern woman. In this novel, Whittet weaves faith, medicine, feminism, and…
Our longtime fiction editor Lacey Dunham is stepping away from the role, and shares some reflections below. I can’t say enough about what a pleasure and privilege it has been to work closely together for nearly a decade (longer, in fact, if you count our first work together when she was a publicist representing my…
A fluctuating, unstable choral voice narrates Directory, an experimental, interlinked collection of flash fiction. The “we” governs the pages until the final story, whose revelation I won’t spoil.
The name Éric Rohmer conjures up, for fans of French New Wave cinema, images of lush lawns and beautiful young people, the sounds of their halfhearted flirtations and of waves crashing against sand. His legacy as a filmmaker is built on a sixty-year career that mixed these hallmark elements with a candid visual style and…
Where do books come from? Maybe from puddles. Or from livery drivers sent to transport you to an undisclosed destination. They come from dark places and light places — and often they arrive in disguise although you are certain you are expecting them.
Rickey Fayne’s debut novel The Devil Three Times (Little, Brown and Company) is an ambitious and expansive tale. Spanning continents and incorporating the voices of eight generations of the Laurent family who all tell their own stories of love, struggle, and temptation, Fayne’s novel is a multigenerational transatlantic tale that takes place across centuries as…