Category: Interviews & Excerpts

“Masks” for Haunted Passages: Short Story Excerpt from How to See Ghosts & Other Figments, a new collection by Orrin Grey

When it comes to short fiction, Orrin Grey is a magician, a practitioner of an arcane art inspired by the likes of Méliès, Welles, and Bradbury. Through literary legerdemain and stylistic sleight-of-hand, he takes the well-told weird tale into a realm of the supernatural, the uncanny, the theatrical, and, most importantly, the entertaining. And entertainment…
Review & Interview: Kristina T. Saccone on Sue Mell’s Giving Care

“I need more pills.” My mom’s texts arrive throughout my day—during back-to-back work meetings, while I’m driving to pick up my seven-year old son from school, and at all hours. “I need more pills.” “Can you get me more meds. I’ve run out.” But she isn’t out of pills; my mom has dementia. The texts…
“Believe with Me”: An Interview with Zach VandeZande by Dana Diehl

When I learned Zach VandeZande had a new short story collection coming out, I jumped at the opportunity to read it early. I already knew I loved his work from encountering it in journals and in his first collection, Liminal Domestic. VandeZande’s stories are both melancholic and hopeful. He approaches his characters with tenderness, but also…
On The Year of the Monster with Tara Stillions Whitehead: An Interview by Shannon Wolf

I sometimes wonder how one person can do so much. At any one time, when I speak to Tara Stillions Whitehead, she is in departmental meetings, corralling children, squeezing in writing time, and still somehow finds the time to be a friend to all in the literary community. It is unsurprising to me that Whitehead—someone…
Exclusive Story Excerpt “The Living” from Campfires of the Dead and the Living by Peter Christopher – Out Now!

Campfires of the Dead and the Living is a collection of short fiction by Peter Christopher. This volume contains The Living—an unpublished collection of stories written between 1990 and 2004—and Campfires of the Dead—Christopher’s first collection, out of print for more than three decades and originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1989. In his…
Three Poems Exclusively from Jay Halsey’s Multi-Form Collection Barely Half in an Awkward Line

Barely Half in an Awkward Line weaves a twelve-year span of Jay Halsey’s photography, poems, short stories, and essays. Photos featuring desolate rural and urban landscapes, thought provoking and oftentimes bizarre portraits of masked subjects, and abandoned homes, alongside written themes involving poverty, chemical abuse, homelessness, violence, the ruling class versus the working class, and…
“The Posthuman Realist”: An Interview with Steve Tomasula by Marcus Pactor

Steve Tomasula is a literary pioneer of both prose and page design. Those designs transform the vast depth of his cultural and scientific research into uniquely satisfying aesthetic experiences of our historical, present-day, and future worlds. His new novel, Ascension, features research notes, drawings of real and hypothetical creatures, and a variety of online links…
“The Possibility of America”: An Interview with Indran Amirthanayagam by John Wall Barger

Born in 1960 in Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon), Indran Amirthanayagam moved to London, England, at eight, and Honolulu at fourteen (where he attended high school with Barack Obama, who was a year younger). He attended Haverford College and then Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. In his years working for the U.S. Foreign Service,…
“Each Drop Is Its Own Light”: Tiffany Troy in Conversation with Dara Barrois/Dixon about Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina

Dara Barrois/Dixon (née Dara Wier) is the author of the Wave Books titles In the Still of the Night, You Good Thing, Reverse Rapture, and also in 2022 two new chapbooks, Two Poems from Scram Press and NINE from Incessant Pipe. She’s received awards and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, American Poetry Review, The Poetry Center Book Award, Guggenheim…