Tag: Marcus Pactor

“A Restless Sensibility”: Marcus Pactor Talks to John Domini, Author of The Archaeology of a Good Ragù

John Domini’s latest book, The Archeology of a Good Ragù: Discovering Naples, My Father, and Myself, marks his first venture into memoir. As in so much of his work, Domini’s writing here busts through the thin shell of its genre. The book expectably documents a critical period of his life—a period in which he rebuilds…
“The Threatening Clarities That a Sentence Can Occasion”: Marcus Pactor Interviews Garielle Lutz

Before I conducted the following interview with Garielle Lutz, I knew what all of her readers have long known: she is one of our finest prose writers and one of our most powerful describers of atomized American life. She transforms seemingly insignificant activities—the pocketing of change, the clicking of a pen to pass the time,…
“Accidental and Inevitable”: Marcus Pactor Talks to Christian TeBordo about His Short Story Collection Ghost Engine

Christian TeBordo’s Ghost Engine has everything I always want from a short story collection. These pieces are darkly humorous, formally inventive, oddly angled, and full of hard, electric prose. It deservedly won the inaugural Bridge Eight Press Prize, and it probably deserved to win a few other prizes too. It is one of the best…
Little Hollywood, a collection of scripts and paper doll actors by Jinnwoo, reviewed by Marcus Pactor

Jinnwoo’s Little Hollywood is an inventive, fun, and depressing collection of stories. Each short piece—none is longer than four pages—is written in the form of a script. The use of this form (which I can only remember seeing carried through an entire book one other time, in Darius James’s Negrophobia) distinguishes his stories from other…
Essays One, the first nonfiction essay collection by fiction writer and translator Lydia Davis, reviewed by Marcus Pactor

Lydia Davis requires little introduction. She is well known for her innovative short fiction, her lone novel, and her many translations. But Davis has also published a number of essays over the past few decades and, at long last, has begun to compile them in two volumes. Essays Two will be published in the near…
Marcus Pactor on Brandi Homan’s New Novel Burn Fortune

Holden Caulfield still irritates me, though I have not read The Catcher in the Rye since before the century’s turn. Teenaged narrators made me crotchety when I was in my twenties. I have become much surlier since then. So maybe I am not the most naturally sympathetic reviewer of a coming-of-age novel like Brandi Homan’s…
“More Fish Than Man,” a short story by Marcus Pactor

My cousin and I once fished under an interstate where a bent leg of swamp lay exposed and easy to approach. Its water was nothing to drink but it held plenty to eat. We caught a couple catfish inside half an hour. Then this not legendarily-sized gator but gator nonetheless came after his cork. My…
Fiction by Marcus Pactor: “Cake”

—after Blake Butler The cake reminded me of the twins’ wet sludge food. I could never shovel it well enough for them. My wife often replaced me halfway through their meals, as a mercy. I did not slice, then, so much as scoop dessert into a bowl. It tasted of egg and hair. That last…