From one girl’s aspiration to Olympic gymnastics glory, to a boy’s stint living in the Idaho wilderness in hopes of fixing his unruly behavior, something that remains a guiding principle in Black ...

Small presses have long been the home of the debut short story collection. I absolutely love short stories, and even I sometimes am overwhelmed by the number of debut story collections. Yet, the three ...

If you’re tapped into the indie publishing world, you may have heard last week about the dissolution of cornerstone Catapult Books. After 10 years of helping emerging writers find footing in a ...

The absence of someone or something is as palpable as their presence. I’ve discovered this—quite painfully—in my own life as the daughter of Palestinian immigrants. Naturally, I’m drawn to exploring ...

Everyone wants to write a book, or to say they have written a book. Publishing a book is still an honor, a point of pride—but like pretty much everything else, it’s also dependent upon a capitalist ...

Cultural alienation is the feeling of being disconnected or estranged from one’s own culture or the culture in which one lives. While these stories traverse continents and cultures painting vivid ...

It begins with a desire to escape. Travel is an elixir, Shirley Hazzard wrote, a talisman. And what is the act of opening a book, if not an act of travel, of transportation? If not, something ...

My novel, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna, was inspired by my own Calabrian family’s history, and in order to write the portions set in Calabria at the turn of the 20 th century I tracked ...

Growing up as a Javanese daughter, there was one word that was drilled deep into my head by my mother: malu, which means “shame.” I had a huge list of things that I shouldn’t do or say because they ...

As a poet, I think about how a poem’s formal elements impact its content. To put it another way: form is the container into which we pour our material, and like water, the poem takes on the form’s ...

Translating one medium into another is tricky. Music is music and art is art and dance is dance; to try to convey the power of another art in fiction is its own sleight-of-hand. Buy the book My own ...

I love books in which a character learns, or learns to master, a new skill. I don’t necessarily buy that the character in question has to discover something deep about themself in the process of ...