Rick Moody was declared by The New Yorker to be one of the most talented American writers under forty at the turn of the century. His first novel, Garden State (1992), won the Pushcart Press Editor’s Choice Award. Two years later, he published The Ice …
Camille Renshaw talks with novelist Leah Stewart about regionalism and research.
Camille Renshaw talks with A. Manette Ansay, author of Sister, Vinegar Hill, and Read This and Tell Me What It Says.
Dillard is teaching us to see. She wants us to be totally immersed in the present, because some day soon 'we die and are put in the earth forever.
Mark Richard populates his latest collection of short stories, Charity, with a desperate set of characters that includes hospitalized orphans, ex cons, mythological figures like Death, and a scorched forest fire fighter. These characters are stripped by adversity, their own stupidity, and addiction, and charity …
Raymond Carver called her a precisionist. Others write that she is a minimalist and a miniaturist. As a student of her work I can only add illuminator and listener. Anything more would be too wordy a description for Amy Hempel. If you’ve never read any …
Although stylistically similar to Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy’s first novel, Suttree, brilliantly undermines the conventions of the Southern novel and the mythology of this tradition. Suttree is the story of an upper-middle class, college educated man who comes to Knoxville to live after being released from …
Rick Moody’s latest novel, Purple America, is the story of a stuttering son, Hex Raitliffe, who is home to care for his mother, a long sick invalid, after she is abandoned by his stepfather. Over the course of a single weekend Hex sees his good …
Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion mixes the cosmic and the carnal into a Napoleonic era, surrealistic romance. The plot and subject matter are nothing new. Winterson’s ideas about language are. The Passion creates, not so much a psychological identification with the main characters, Henri and Villanelle, …
The 1990 Pulitzer Prize winner The World Doesn’t End is the only prose poetry collection to date to win that prestigious award. At the time the outcry and protests of prosaic poets and stuffy reviewers could be heard everywhere. The controversy itself was the only …
Aliens of Affection is the perfect title for Padgett Powell’s most recent collection of short stories because it is at once alienating and endearing. Powell’s stories precisely reflect his characters’ mental stations and instability, underlining the extremes people go to for sanity. Despite the delirium …
Voice is the key to Powell’s first novel, Edisto. “You say it ‘Simmons.’ I’m a rare one-m Simons,” says Powell’s 12-year-old narrator and child genius, Simons Manigault. Simons is a real kid, a young pillar of sanity in the midst adult absurdity, whose voice is …
Maybe five years seems short to you....
Doing the ten exercises below will improve your sex life. The ten exercises below can be used to teach writing students, or you can use them yourself to generate fresh ideas for poems, stories, or essays. I owe many thanks to the dozens of professional …
Camille Renshaw explores what makes for a good short, short story.
“Pivo,” the woman in cutoffs said to the waitress. “What did you say?” the man with golden hair asked. “I ordered us some more beer. Is that okay?” “Yeah, that’s good.” The streets of Prague were full of musicians and cafés. Men and women with …
