I was introduced to Louise Marburg and her writing via the rejection contest my friend Reneé Bibby runs. The contest started out as a way for Tucson writers to encourage each other to submit, as well as to lessen the sting of rejection, by awarding a trophy to the writer who earned the most rejections…

Photo: David WakelyI met Ron Nyren in the early 1990s when we worked together in the marketing department of a midsized architecture firm. I knew his passion was fiction and was happy for him when he went to an MFA program. When he returned to the Bay Area, he received a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford.…

Sadie Hoagland and Maria Kuznetsova first met in 2008, when they were studying fiction writing at UC Davis under Yiyun Li, Lucy Corin, Lynn Freed, and Pam Houston. Each has a second book out this spring — Kuznetsova’s second novel, Something Unbelievable, from Random House, and Hoagland’s debut novel, Strange Children, from Red Hen Press…

Erin McGraw’s seventh and most recent book Joy (Counterpoint, 2019) is a collection of flash fiction or “short-shorts.” Despite its cheerful title, Erin McGraw’s Joy is about anything but. In fifty-three pieces of sudden fiction, characters find joy hard to come by. A fifteen-year-old girl hears a news report of a local rape and knows…

In his new story collection, Claire, Wading Into the Danube By Night, Jeffrey Condran’s fiction once again shines a light on places where the personal meets the political in the age of anxiety, and where characters who feel battered by life have no choice but to look for hope in the small intimacies that sometimes…

Steve Wingate is a Colorado man. His first novel, Of Fathers and Fire (2019), was set there, and his second, The Leave-Takers (2021), was supposed to be, too. But when Wingate moved to South Dakota — not the usual order of operations; my home state is a place people generally leave — he said the…

Chloe N. Clark tells Rachel Mans McKenny about her new story collection Collective Gravities (Word West Press, July 2020), her craft, her editing habits, and the apocalypse. This interview was shortened and edited for clarity. + The short stories in Collective Gravities take place in either Midwestern cities and landscapes or space. What was your…

Michael Nye discusses his novel All The Castles Burned (Turner Publishing) and his editorship of STORY with Kathy Bates. + Kathy Bates: It’s exciting to hear the about the relaunch of STORY whose origins date back to 1941. As the new editor-in-chief, what are your plans for the literary magazine, and what should readers and…

Photo © Carolina CabanillasIn Melanie Hatter’s Malawi’s Sisters, winner of the inaugural Kimbilio National Fiction Prize (Four Way Books), three sisters from a well-to-do Washington DC family follow separate paths in life. The oldest, Kenya, follows in her parents’ footsteps, first becoming a successful attorney like her father and then a homemaker like her mother.…

David H. Lynn discusses his new short story collection Children of God (Braddock Avenue Books, May 2019) and his editorship of the Kenyon Review with Grayson Treat. + Grayson Treat: Children of God is a collection of stories old and new. It’s easy to see the recurring theme in the newer stories, all featuring characters…

Two storytellers inspired by landscape — and, as it happens, both fans of the movie, Days of Heaven — Cary Holladay and Charles Dodd White recently read each other’s new books, swapped questions and answers, and found common ground in dangerous characters, moments of weirdness, and “thoughts that would shame hell.” + First, Cary Holladay…

From a newly divorced woman employed by a front for illegal drugs, to a man who seeks revenge when the farm he loves is invaded by meth producers, to a shady Arkansas businessman wrestling with his own wildness (and that of his teen son) as he attempts to return a domesticated bobcat to its native…