Even those readers who have never been to the Midwestern United States, never seen the plains of Kansas nor the peaks of the Ozark Mountains in Missouri, never dipped a fingertip in the ice-cold lakes of Illinois and Wisconsin, the wind cutting like the blade of a newly sharpened knife, will, after reading Casey Pycior’s debut collection, feel a kinship…

Research — to search — sounds glamorous, romantic, even adventurous. Indiana Jones does research. That dimly mulleted man Tom Hanks plays in The Da Vinci Code does research. A noble and globe-trotting — perhaps perilous — seeking out of the truth!

Austin scratched at his sunburned ankles and flicked sand fleas into the Gulf as the surf licked at his toes like a dog trying to get a bad taste out of its mouth.

Susan Muaddi Darraj talks to Amina Gautier about her books, the use of imagery, and the importance of place in fiction.

In Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, Aimee Parkison takes the beautiful, the lyrical, the emotional, and pins it tightly to the horrific, the satirical, and a sense of existential terror—an unsettling juxtaposition that leaves the reader both full and empty, singing and weeping.

I started taking notes when I visited the Bahamas — to develop an off-campus course for the college where I teach — not because I thought I’d write a book, but because jotting down words, images, and ideas on scraps of paper is something I’ve always done.

You are not like other children. You prefer to wear suits, no sweat pants, baggy shorts, shirts with team logos. You are not a slovenly child, she tells the reporter.

Berit Ellingsen’s Vessel and Solsvart is a collection of five short, dark fairy tales, full of richly imaginative story weaving, and beautifully poetic language. Each story has a slightly different tone, a different feel, but all share a sense of the magical, the bizarre, or the straight up weird.

I show up. I wake up. I pitch up. I lift up. I look up. I set up. I stand up. I sit down. I sit up, I press on, I switch on, I switch off, I come back, I look back, I look up, I stand up, I see in, I see out, I see this and that, I take this, I leave that, I love it, I hate it, I love it, I hate it, I write, I unwrite, I overwrite, I underplay, I play, I think, I unthink, I undo, I do, I rest.