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Ellen Oh’s Prophecy Trilogy and Why #WeNeedDiverseBooks
by Terry Hong For Ellen Oh, good things seem to happen in threes. She’s the proud mother of three daughters. She’s had three careers—lawyer, professor, and finally a published writer (after 40!). The...
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The Tribal Gene: Jamil Ahmad’s Lost Worlds
by T.L. Khleif 1. “In the tangle of crumbling, weather-beaten, and broken hills where the borders of Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan meet,” begins Jamil Ahmad’s astonishing debut novel, The Wandering...
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An Excerpt from Anjali Mitter Duva’s Faint Promise Of Rain
Following is an excerpt from Anjali Mitter Duva’s Faint Promise Of Rain, out on on October 7 from She Writes Press. Chapter 1 Mahendra ~ Summer 1554 For five long years, the rains had failed to come....
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Ruthless, Beautiful, Dangerous, Comforting: How It Is in the World of Tove...
by Sonya Chung 1. I am sometimes tempted to create and claim an alternate childhood: sepia memories featuring fantastical lands, imaginary friends and foes, brilliant DIY costumes and dwellings; and,...
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Moomintroll Redux
by Lisa Peet 1. The prospect of rereading childhood books, particularly the ones that were special, can be a bit discomfiting: an adult understanding of plot and form and dialogue superimposed over...
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Fanny Trollope: “Tested as Few Women Have Been”
by Cynthia Miller Coffel 1. Frances Trollope, called Fanny and known primarily as the mother of the late-Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, was a prolific writer herself, and certainly one who...
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The Short Fiction of Murray Farish: “Something Ought to Be Possible”
by Evelyn Somers 1. I first encountered the short fiction of Murray Farish almost exactly ten years ago, when the Missouri Review, where I’ve edited fiction and essays for many years, published his...
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Private Lives, Artful Truths: Joan Chase’s Midwestern Eden
by Amy Weldon 1. Every year I teach Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein to first-year college students, who can’t quite believe it was written by a girl their age. How could someone so young create a...
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J.C. Todd: Rising into the Light
by Athena Kildegaard 1. J.C. Todd wrote poetry as a child and then returned to it when she was in her thirties. In her early forties she published her first chapbook, then attended the acclaimed MFA...
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Eating Wildly for the Belly and Soul with Ava Chin
by Terry Hong These days, Ava Chin is living her happy beginnings: she’s the mother to an energetic toddler, wife to the man of her dreams, professor of creative nonfiction and journalism at her...
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An Excerpt from Gene Oishi’s Fox Drum Bebop
Following is an excerpt from Gene Oishi’s forthcoming novel Fox Drum Bebop, which will be released in December 2014 by Kaya Press. The Fox 1947-1950 Even before the war, the 10-mile ride from...
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Mark-Making in the West: Malcolm Brooks’s Painted Horses
by Lisa Peet 1. The literary Western is an archeological dig of a genre. In the same way you can see thousands of years in the geological strata of a canyon wall, a well-stocked bookstore’s Western...
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BEST OF BLOOM: Quilting Without a Pattern—On Making a First Novel
The following is an encore post, originally published at Bloom on March 21, 2014 by Kim Church I don’t quilt. I don’t even sew. But I regularly watch a sewing show, which for me is like watching magic....
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The Not Non-Fiction of Magdalena Tulli
by Nicki Leone 1. On it he wrought in all their beauty two cities of mortal men. —The Iliad, line 490 Like many creation myths, Dreams and Stones begins with a tree: The tree of the world, like every...
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Wendi Kaufman: a Book, a Community, a Legacy
by Evelyn Somers 1. Although she passed away in August, 2014, Wendi Harris Kaufman’s Facebook page was still active when I viewed it recently. I was trying to learn more about the life of an emerging...
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Agnes Martin’s Perfection: Now and Not Yet
by Sonya Chung 1. I come back to Agnes Martin again and again. This time, I did not anticipate how difficult—how disturbing—it would be to re-engage with her work. I thought I knew something about...
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Mourning New York: Cari Luna and The Revolution of Every Day
by Nicole Wolverton 1. New York City has a reputation. People expect it to be big and fast-paced and extraordinary and dangerous. All the things that perhaps their real lives, the lives of suburbanites...
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Yahya Frederickson in Yemen: The Gold of the Wayfarer
by Athena Kildegaard 1. Some poets travel to distant lands and bring back exotic sights and smells. But others go to witness turmoil or violence, to be at the center of political or social change and...
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Secret Lives: Katherine Heiny’s Single, Carefree, Mellow
by Joe Schuster 1. You are Katherine Heiny, and when you’re 24, you write a second-person short story for an MFA creative writing workshop at Columbia University—“How to Give the Wrong Impression,”...
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“The Live Wire of the Life”: the Fiction of Tessa Hadley
by Evelyn Somers 1. A few paragraphs into Tessa Hadley’s story “One Saturday Morning,” which appeared in The New Yorker last August, I had a pleasant start of recognition. Carrie, the ten-year-old...
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