I first came across Sarah Freligh and her work through her poem “Wondrous,” which was first published in The Sun and then seemed to appear everywhere at once. A line from this gorgeous poem, in which the speaker remembers her mother reading Charlotte’s Web, became the title of her 2015 poetry collection, Sad Math: “my…

In The Road from Belhaven (Knopf) by Margot Livesey one gets lost in the quiet beauty of the 19th century Scottish countryside. Lizzie Craig, raised by her grandparents, knows that she has the gift of second sight from the moment that her first glimpse of the future comes into fruition. A blessing and a curse,…

Anna Mantzaris recently released her first book, Occupations (Galileo Press), a trim collection of stories whose strange charm defies narrative logic. Around each story’s surreal comic streak runs a manic filigree. What feels like playful eccentricity and whimsy on first read, gradually becomes unnerving as things progress. Mantzaris’s first-person narrators appear so composed and clear-spoken,…

Mary Fleming and I first met through a friend, while I was teaching in Paris the spring of 2011. Charlie Trueheart, then director of the American Library in Paris, thought we’d get along and he organized a dinner at a restaurant next to a church near where they both lived. When Mary and I got together next, I met her golden-haired…

“You can not combine memoir with fiction!”: Sylvia Brownrigg in conversation with Sarah Stone about The Whole Staggering Mystery: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found Sylvia Brownrigg, the Northern California Book Award and Lambda Literary Award–winning author of seven works of fiction, is also a critic and book reviewer, including for the New York…

In Heading North (Braddock Avenue Books), Viktor has high hopes of playing for the NHL in America. When a plane crash kills all his teammates, including his secret boyfriend, Nikolai, Viktor is left alone to gather up his grief. There is no triumph over pain, but like any aging athlete knows, learning to live with the hurt makes…

Within the past six years Theodore Wheeler has published three novels, Kings of Broken Things (2017), In Our Other Lives (2020), and The War Begins in Paris (2023), all three of which are set during periods of war. Set during World War I and culminating with the Red Summer of 1919, a period known for…

In The Geography of First Kisses (Kallisto Gaia Press), one finds portrayals of quiet elegance reminiscent of early-20th-century art films. The fourteen ethereal stories are tethered to the bays and backwaters of southern Louisiana, the fields of Iowa and Oklahoma, the pine woods of Florida, places where girls and women seek love and belonging, and…

Kalamazoo is a town brimming with poetry, and so us fiction writers have to stick together.  I’ve known Andy Mozina for twenty years, ever since he came here to teach creative writing at Kalamazoo College, and I’ve been marveling at his work ever since reading his short story “Cowboy Pile,” in which he creates a…

Considered Virginia Woolf’s greatest novel, Mrs. Dalloway tells the story of a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a high society woman in post-World War I England. As she is preoccupied with the last-minute details of dinner party, Clarissa is flooded with remembrances of the past, in the process reexamining the choices she has made,…

Tucker Leighty-Phillips is going to have to change his bio at some point.  On his website, he tells readers that “Last year, [he] turned 31 and didn’t tell anyone.  This year, [he’s] back in Kentucky for the first time in a decade.”  I’m guessing he won’t stay thirty-one forever, and besides, his debut collection, Maybe…

I met Donnaldson Brown when she joined the 2020 cohort of Bookgardan, the low-res writing program that I direct for Craigardan artist residency center. She’d already finished her first novel, and while she worked on her second she generously shared her unique, largely non-textual method for developing fully-dimensional fictional worlds and characters, likely informed by…