Category: Interviews & Excerpts

An Excerpt from Danny Joseph’s Shortish Novel Danny the Ambulance

Danny the Ambulance is a novel about a man who walks into a bar and over the course of the night realizes everyone in the bar is named Danny. The Jury Room feels like a long thin unendurable shack and the rain pouring down overtop has the cadence and impact of tiny hammers falling on…
Zach Savich: Two from The Motherwell Sonnets

“. . . the purpose of abstraction in any field—art, science, mathematics—is, out of incredible richness and complexity and detail of reality, ‘to separate,’ ‘to select from’ the complexity of reality that which you want to emphasize . . .” (Robert Motherwell, “On the Humanism of Abstraction”) The Motherwell Sonnets considers what this kind of abstraction…
Abby Frucht Interviews David Winner on His New Novel, Master Lovers

While clearing out his great aunt’s midtown apartment after her death, author David Winner discovered artifacts of her storied existence: notes from opera stars, love letters, and artifacts from the Middle East of the 1930s. His Aunt Dorle had been a co-founder of Angel Records and a prominent figure in the mid-century classical music world.…
Mary Ellen Thompson Talks to Dawn Major about The Bystanders

An avid fan of the rodeo and cowboy hats, Dawn Major has crafted her debut novel, The Bystanders, which, at first glance, appears to be an academic commentary about American society. But appearances are deceiving. Set in a small town in Missouri in the 1980s, this story uniquely captures the essence of the characters’ lives…
“Strange Juxtapositions”: Marcus Pactor Interviews Babak Lakghomi

Babak Lakghomi’s disturbing fiction builds intensity and paranoia with its constant suggestion of growing but never-fully-seen darkness stalking beneath the muscular prose. His latest work, South, is a strangely seductive dystopian novel. In it, a journalist named B. is asked to report on labor strife in a distant region of his country. But his interviews…
Matt L. Roar & Niina Pollari Discuss Their New Poetry Books, MY WAR and Path of Totality

I first read Niina Pollari’s Path of Totality on a plane and was immediately torn between giving into the book, allowing myself to weep my way from JFK to SFO, or to pull myself together and not thoroughly weird-out the passenger in the neighboring seat. Niina’s book is funny and smart and sad and intimate enough…
“Secret Rewards” Craft Essay: Jolene McIlwain on Writing PTSD in Fiction

You don’t want to think it’s your heart. You want to think it’s a pulled muscle, pinched nerve, or bad posture because you’ve always forgotten and slouched. But you agree to the stress test because if it is your heart, this is an early find. You’re only forty-seven. There’s time to repair. It’s been happening…
“Ashenfolk”: William Lessard Interviews Joseph Mosconi + 6 Exclusive Poems

Joseph Mosconi is a writer, editor, and curator based in Los Angeles. A former Google computational linguist, he is the executive director of the Poetic Research Bureau (PRB), a hybrid arts space that hosts weekly readings, performances, and films by today’s most progressive poets and artists. Mosconi is also a co-founder and programmer at 2220…
“Hills, Valleys, Bluffs, Rivers, Streams, Steep Ravines”: An Interview with Keith Pilapil Lesmeister by Giano Cromely

When a friend sent me a copy of Keith Pilapil Lesmeister’s chapbook, Mississippi River Museum, along with the message that she thought it might be up my alley, I didn’t know what to expect. It’s hard to be aware of one’s own literary alleys, or at least what others perceive those alleys to be, so…