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 ...

In the thirteen years since Tana French published her first novel, she’s gained a rabid and dedicated readership (a friend of mine refers to herself as a Tanavangelist), a shelf’s worth of awards ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Recently, I was texting with the editor of my most recent book about how there seem to be cycles in in literature, some kind of zeitgeist or collective unconscious, like how for a minute there were so ...

As award-winning horror writer Stephen Graham Jones writes, there are two types of haunted houses in fiction: Stay Away Houses and Hungry Houses. That is to say, houses that don’t want visitors or ...

What is a family? As a child, answering that question felt like the easiest thing in the world. I was still blissfully oblivious, then, to the complexities of family life. The varying configurations, ...

I was trekking through the neighborhood next to mine, on my way to work. It was a long walk, but one of those perfect summer days that just a few months earlier, in the thick gloom of Boston winter, ...

The following coming-of-age novels by African women authors are shaped by an understanding of the deep and complex relationships between women. In these works, the individual path of the traditional ...