Fiction
Beanstalk Girl by Charlotte Fong
A wild strand of hair sprouts from Erin’s head, aiming vertically but with a sharp kink, as though it suddenly changed its mind. She attempts to brush it down, wetting it even in the bathroom at work, but it continues to spring back and point upwards.
Research Notes
Donna Miscolta on Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories
When your work of fiction is sorta, kinda semi-autobiographical, you rely less on research than on memory in creating that mean kindergarten teacher clad in bright primary colors and clackety-clack high heels, or that little blond girl next door whose dress-up closet included a bridal gown, a hula skirt, and child-sized stilettos, or that beleaguered high school English teacher whose eyebrows quarreled with each other in a proxy battle with his smart-aleck class.
Fiction
Anonymity by Paul Hostovsky
Remember that alcoholic you tried to help, the one you took to those meetings, those meetings you were attending yourself because you needed help to stop drinking and the only way to get it, they said at those meetings, was to give it?
Research Notes
Lee Matthew Goldberg on The Ancestor
Research is one of my favorite parts of being a fiction writer. It’s less stressful than the actual writing process, and even though I tend to plot out most of a book, the research winds up guiding the narrative.
Fiction
Because We, Too, Must Run by Peter Grandbois
I’ve hit the face of God head on. The rain falls and falls in the black night. The moon slivers white on the horizon. The highway a grey thread, unspooling.
Fiction
Hocus Pocus by Linda Woolford
Denny’s father bent over the bottle on the coffee table. The magic had happened, the ship was inflated — sails and all — and encased in its glass sea. The trick, now, was to get the fly out of the bottle.
Book Reviews
Cargill Falls by William Lychack
In a voice both poetic and meditative, Lychack, in this work of autofiction, moves gracefully back and forth across time, as he looks for the unnamable in what happened in the past as a way to make sense of the pain and confusions of the present moment.
Research Notes
Gwen Goodkin on A Place Remote
I describe the act of writing like this: I’m essentially a taxi driver. A story comes in and it’s my job to get it to its destination in the best way I can. And, like passengers, all my stories are different.
Fiction
A Man in New York Remembering by Ali A. Ünal
All quiet. Eyes are on me. The winter says I’ve got three seconds to learn how to float, or she will shrug my life out.
Book Reviews
The New American by Micheline Aharonian Marcom
A catalyst for connection and empathy, The New American is also an immersive page-turner that will keep you reading eagerly to its conclusion.
Research Notes
David Hollander on Anthropica
My favorite of the logical fallacies is the “argument from incredulity.”
I cannot imagine that ‘x’ can be true. Therefore ‘x’ must be false.