In their new memoir, Daddy Boy (McSweeney’s, 2023), Emerson Whitney chronicles his time on a storm-chasing tour through Tornado Alley as they think through familial relationships, weather, transness, and questions of control and submission. In conversation with World Voices Festival Associate Director Sabir Sultan for this week’s PEN Ten , Emerson spoke about surrendering understanding, […]
Have you ever had a talking doll that accompanied you at all times, or is Nadja – in FX’s What We Do in the Shadows the only one? Whether you’ve ever played with a doll like this before or not, Nadja’s toy, possessed by her old self, is unlike any other, as you’ve surely noticed […]
Credit…Rebecca Clarke “I regret that I never met Hilary Mantel,” says the Booker-winning Scottish novelist, whose most recent book, “Young Mungo,” is now out in paperback. “I would be delighted with three of her.” What books are on your night stand? I’ve been itinerant lately, so I tend to carry my reading everywhere I go. […]
This week on The Maris Review , Sarah Viren joins Maris Kreizman to discuss To Name the Bigger Lie , out now from Scribner. Subscribe and download the episode , wherever you get your podcasts. Episode 212: Sarah Viren Forward 15 seconds Back 15 seconds Share Subscribe Description * from the episode: Maris Kreizman: I […]
I love having a crush. Sometimes I feel it coming like a wave, gently washing over me, a warm feeling, I bob about in it, let myself get carried away. I remember the first crush I ever had, before I even knew what the feeling was. The time dragging in long lessons without her, saving […]
It’s that spooky frisson that makes you, for a split second, want to throw your book across the room. Or chuckle. Or flail, blindly, for the familiar barrier between storyworld and readerworld—you know, your world. There’s nothing as electric as an experimental flourish executed well, and metafiction (defined, loosely, as fiction which draws attention to […]
Editor and literary critic Oscar Villalon joins V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to celebrate the life and legacy of the novelist Cormac McCarthy, who died last month. The hosts and Villalon reflect on McCarthy’s vast vocabulary and cinematic descriptions, in which he juxtaposed lyrical prose with graphic violence. Villalon considers McCarthy’s use of regionally accurate […]
Mary Lavin in 1966. Photograph: Evelyn Hofer/Getty “I’ve seen it at Kilmallock,” says writer Kathleen MacMahon. ”It was amazing, really, because we were, in fact, in the middle of the fields.” The title story of a collection of Mary Lavin’s short stories, In the Middle of the Fields, has been adopted rather than adapted as […]
