Like the characters in Hard Toward Home (Press 53, May 2016), his debut short fiction collection, C. D. Albin lives in the Ozarks, a place that can have an almost mystical hold on the hearts of its people, despite the hardships that life there can bring. Albin tells the stories of people who know this…

Photo: Tara DaceyPatrick Dacey grew up on Cape Cod and went to Syracuse University hoping to become a professional football player, an offensive lineman to be specific. Because of an injury, he was unable to pursue a collegiate football career, and after taking a class with George Saunders, he was inspired to be a fiction…

It was recently announced that two stories from Grant Faulkner’s Fissures (Press 53), his collection of one hundred 100-word stories, were chosen by Stuart Dybek and Series Editor Tara L. Masih for inclusion in the forthcoming Best Small Fictions 2016 (Queen’s Ferry Press). Last year I reviewed Fissures for Necessary Fiction, noting that the collection…

This spring, Ig Publishing will release the first four titles in their “Bookmarked” series. In these books, authors are invited to write about a book that influenced their work and lives. In this first wave, Curtis Smith writes about Slaughterhouse-Five, Kirby Gann takes on A Separate Peace, Paula Bomer writes about The Man Who Loved…

A Conversation between Two Authors Diversity in fiction is receiving some publicity these days, and writers of color are maybe not as ignored as they were a few decades ago. Yet there is a lot of work to be done before South Asian women writers telling stories from diaspora become mainstream. Issues like dual identity,…

Like the protagonist of her debut novel Re Jane (Pamela Dorman Books, May 2015), Patricia Park grew up in Flushing, Queens. She then attended Bronx High School of Science, Swarthmore College, and Boston University. Her writing is feminist and socially conscious with a mix of humor and lightness that delivers the serious themes beneath her…

Art credit: Grace LawrieDerek Palacio is determined and capable — the type of person who has about twenty projects going at any given time, and can juggle them all while sipping coffee and answering questions with a warm smile on his face. At the time of this interview, in late-August 2013, he had just returned…

Very early in Foreign Gods, Inc., the second novel from Nigerian-American writer Okey Ndibe, we find Ikechukwu “Ike” Uzondu strolling through the eponymous Manhattan business where ancient relics and statues of deities are sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s his first trip to the store, though he already knows this is where he…

I sat down with Jeffrey Condran this fall — me at a computer in Ogden, Utah, and Jeff at a computer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — to chat about this breakthrough moment in his career. Our conversation ranged from there to his travels through Eastern Europe and the inspiration he found there to the art of…

Three innovative authors — Jenny Bitner, Jønathan Lyons, and Catie Jarvis — published in the new anthology Writing That Risks: New Work from Beyond the Mainstream talk with editor and Red Bridge Press founder Liana Holmberg. + Liana Holmberg: Your styles range from surreal to experimental. In this book, there’s a shapeshifting kindergartener, a conversation…

Posting, commenting, tweeting, texting — how have the protocols of social media and online communication affected the form and content of what we read and how we write? As the next installment in our ongoing, occasional series of roundtable conversations, we present this colloquy between Shawn Syms, editor of Friend. Follow. Text. #storiesFromLivingOnline, a new…

What books and/or authors have had the most influence on your writing? As a child, the novels and short stories of Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. Leguin introduced me to fiction’s possibilities. In college, John Irving’s The World According to Garp made me push in all the chips and say, “This is what I’m going…