Red Leap Theatre on adapting the short story “Animal Wife” for the stage—and trusting young audiences with grief

Sean Bernard’s Can Writing Be Taught & Other Novel Ideas (What Books Press, October 2026) is a metafictional reflection on reading, writing, loneliness, and the creation of meaning. It’s a strange ride through writing prompts that have words crossed out, summaries of other books, and an ever-shifting point-of-view. But despite the formal inventiveness, there’s a…

I first met Bradley Sides at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was showcasing his short story collection Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood (Montag Press, 2024). We soon discovered our shared loves of magic in fiction and southern literature, and Bradley impressed me with his generous spirit. Those same themes–magic,…

Our longtime fiction editor Lacey Dunham is stepping away from the role, and shares some reflections below. I can’t say enough about what a pleasure and privilege it has been to work closely together for nearly a decade (longer, in fact, if you count our first work together when she was a publicist representing my…

Rickey Fayne’s debut novel The Devil Three Times (Little, Brown and Company) is an ambitious and expansive tale. Spanning continents and incorporating the voices of eight generations of the Laurent family who all tell their own stories of love, struggle, and temptation, Fayne’s novel is a multigenerational transatlantic tale that takes place across centuries as…

As a lover of the retelling of history to promote the female gaze and/or reshape a less sexist heroine, and of travel writing in general, I picked up Chandra Grace Johner’s debut collection Naked in Turkey (AOS Publishing).

Jon Hickey’s debut novel Big Chief (Simon & Schuster) tackles political corruption and family ruptures on the Passage Rouge reservation in the Northwoods of Wisconsin where Mack Beck, a reservation president who looks the part with “that long hair, that immovable mountain mass, the beadwork medallions and satin ribbon shirts” (15-16), but is only a…

Serkan Görkemli’s debut short story collection Sweet Tooth and Other Stories follows the lives of queer characters whose paths intersect at various times and in various locales across the Turkish countryside.

Danilo John Thomas’s story collection, Ore Vein, (Veliz Press) reminds me of a lenticular—one of those weird grooved pictures that shifts images—and I’m a kid jumping from one side of the room to another, watching the flowers bloom then wilt, or the skeleton grow flesh.

The shared terrain, in place and theme, gave Toor and I a lot to talk about in a recent conversation that took place online, including the idea of representation in fiction, coming-of-age narratives, and more.

Claire Jiménez is the author of two full-length works of fiction, the short story collection Staten Island Stories (John Hopkins University Press, 2019), the novel What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Grand Central Publishing, 2023). Staten Island Stories features twelve short stories which follow the lives of Staten Islanders living in hostile environments and economically uncomfortable…

I had the pleasure of meeting Tayyba Kanwal almost two summers ago in an online workshop on poetic forms led by Jai Chakrabarti and hosted by A Public Space. When the class ended, several of us wanted to keep the energy going. We’ve continued to meet over Zoom from our separate corners of the United…