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…

Jared Yates Sexton, an Indiana native, is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University. His short story collection, An End to All Things, was published by Atticus Books in 2012, and he is putting final touches on his second novel. His work, which has appeared internationally, has been nominated for two Pushcarts,…

What books and/or authors have had the most influence on your writing? I’ve been most influenced by writers who balance their stories on the fault lines of political/social turmoil and the inner lives of the characters. Early on, I discovered Laura Z. Hobson and I’ve admired her books (Gentlemen’s Agreement, First Paper, Tenth Month, Consenting…

What books and/or authors have had the most influence on your writing? I’m almost embarrassed to answer this question, partly because my biggest influences (Tolstoy, Kafka, Joyce and Shakespeare) might seem just a bunch of “the usual suspects,” and partly because merely saying that these authors “influenced” me seems to imply that I have somehow…

1. What books and/or authors have had the most influence on your writing? There are a ton of them, far too many to name. I read in order to be influenced, to pick up as many influences as possible. That said, if there’s one influence that has remained consistently strong since early in my writing…

What books and/or authors have had the most influence on your writing? I was really fortunate to have great professors, both as an undergraduate and graduate student at Temple University. They had the most influence because they looked at my writing and then told me what to read. They suggested people like John Hawkes, Patricia…

What books and/or authors have had the most influence on your writing? I enjoy heroic journeys and narratives that somehow get to a character’s bones rather than simply skimming their skin. Most great writers have this uncanny ability, but I always return to three genres for this reading experience since I was a child: Greek…

What books and/or authors have had the most influence on your writing? I feel I have a variety of influences behind my work. Flannery O’Connor and her collected stories have been very formative, as have the collected stories of Vladimir Nabokov, which I used to carry around constantly. I select Flannery for her density, bold…

Yes, this is when I first became enthralled by the mad wives, my eternal reference point; when I began reading the lives of these women often marginalized in the modernist memory project. They have been with me as long as I have tried to write — like ghostly tutors. — Heroines, p.13 In 2012, Semiotext(e)…

What books and/or authors have had the most influence on your writing? Well, I try to work on my own voice. But there are authors who make me excited about what writing can achieve, incredibly talented writers who inspire me to try to be half as good as they are in terms of their command…