CategoryFICTION AND POETRY

The following is from Alejandro Zambra’s The Private Lives of Trees. Zambra is the author of ten books, including Multiple Choice, Bonsai, and My Documents, a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. The recipient of numerous literary prizes, as well as a New York Public Library Cullman Center fellowship, he has published fiction and essays in The New Yorker, The New...

“English!”

The following is from Fiona McFarlane’s The Sun Walks Down. McFarlane is the author of The Night Guest (2013) and The High Places (2016), which won the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Her short fiction has been published in the New Yorker and Zoetrope: All-Story. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. Colony of South Australia, September 1883 The boy met a god by the...

The following is from Hanna Pylvinen’s The End of Drum-Time. Pylvinen is the author of the novel We Sinners, which received a Whiting Award and a Balcones Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in Harpers Magazine, the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Chicago Tribune, and the Wall Street Journal. She is on the faculty at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers and lives...

The following is from Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture. Riker is the co-founder and publisher of the feminist press Dorothy, a Publishing Project, and the author of Samuel Johnsons Eternal Return. He teaches in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis, and his criticism has appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, among other publications. What are you...

The following is from Lauren John Joseph’s At Certain Points We Touch. Joseph is a British born American-educated artist and writer, who works at the intersection of video, text, and live performance. They have written extensively on contemporary culture, art, performance, pornography, gender theory and the Golden Age of Hollywood, including Everything Must Go (ITNA Press in 2014), and the...

The following is from Jane Smiley’s A Dangerous Business. Smiley is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and the Last Hundred Years Trilogy: Some Luck, Early Warning, and Golden Age. She is the author as well of several works of nonfiction and books for young adults. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has...