Category: Interviews & Excerpts

“An Undertow to Struggle Against”: Anne Valente in Conversation with Dustin M. Hoffman

Dustin M. Hoffman’s debut short story collection, One Hundred-Knuckled Fist, is filled with the voices of workers and the environments of workplaces: what so often goes unnoticed in fiction, as if how we spend so much of our day must remain invisible in literature. Instead of viewing work as only one small token of characterization,…
Daniel Falatko’s Condominium Blog Tour: Top Five

It probably says a lot about Condominium that none of the top five songs looming over the plot are by bands that ever existed. Whether this is an indicator of good things about the novel (“A cutting, surreal satire!”) or negative aspects (“What the hell is this thing even about?”) is up in the air,…
“It Was Getting Dark Outside but I Didn’t Want to Stop Reading to Turn the Light On”: A Short Interview with Story Prize Judge Joanna Ruocco

Joanna Ruocco holds an MFA from Brown and a PhD from the University of Denver. She is the author of The Mothering Coven (Ellipses Press, 2009), Man’s Companions (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010), A Compendium of Domestic Incidents (which won the 2009 Noemi Press Fiction Chapbook Contest; judged by Rikki Ducornet), Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych (which won the FC2 Catherine…
“What It Would Be Like to Fall”: A Conversation with Brian Evenson by Daniel Miller

Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, including the forthcoming story collection A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press, 2016). Coffee House Press will also be reissuing his American Library Association’s award-winning novel, Last Days, as well as two more novels: The Open Curtain and Father of Lies. He has translated…
“My Own Sad Little Kind of Prayer”: An Interview with Gregory Lawless by Jack Christian

The poems of Gregory Lawless’s Far Away (Red Mountain Press, 2015/Red Mountain Poetry Prize) all deal with various figurations of distance—distance as a bringer of insight, as a form of estrangement, and as a synonym of loss and uncertainty. As these poems rove over the ruined fields of northeastern Pennsylvania, we encounter a speaker who…
“Stealing Breath”: An Interview with Bryn Chancellor by Erin Flanagan

Bryn Chancellor’s collection When Are You Coming Home? won the 2014 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Her stories have appeared in Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. She has received the Poets & Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award in fiction, literary fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the Arizona Commission…
“Moving Beyond Humanness”: An Interview with Carol Guess & Kelly Magee by Dana Diehl

A girl sheds jellyfish from her skin. A man grows a Joey in his artificial womb. One woman buzzes with locusts, while another carries a sparrow in her chest. A bank teller adopts a baby hippo he finds in a baby hatch. A man’s girlfriend gives birth to a live school of fish. In their…
“The Whole World Around You Is Sort of Decomposing”: An Interview with Stefan Kiesbye by Robyn Ringler

Stefan Kiesbye and I first met at the University of Tampa, where I was a student in the low-residency MFA program. Stefan was a faculty member. While he was not my direct mentor, he taught many classes and workshops, and generously shared his views on fiction with me and other students. I felt I knew…
“When You Look Away, What Do You Choose to See?”: Bayard Godsave in Interview with George McCormick

George McCormick is the author of two books of fiction. Both are marked by a strong sense of place, the American West specifically, and a poet’s ear for language. The opening story in his short story collection Salton Sea (Noemi Press, 2012), “The Mexican,” earned him a PEN/O. Henry prize in 2012. Inland Empire (Queen’s Ferry Press,…