In Patty Yumi Cottrell’s novel Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, the narrator Helen Moran investigates her adopted brother’s suicide, an effort complicated by Helen’s own profound alienation. Relentlessly interior, discursive and associative, the novel reads as the direct outcome of Helen’s grief, an inner crisis she attempts to control with obsessive tactics that give the novel its form.
For the young, left-leaning reader, there are plenty of smart literary voices online to choose from, but I often find myself gravitating toward Katy Waldman, a staff writer at Slate whose literary criticism offers some of the freshest takes on books that you are likely to find anywhere.
Dear Nikki: Thank you for sharing your new short story, “Oops I don’t have a title haha,” with the class. I look forward to discussing it in workshop. I read this story as an exploration of the narrator’s excitement and disappointments during a rock-climbing trip with a group of friends, and as a meditation on…
We’ve been told not to use the metro. We’ve lived through warnings during Nevruz, the Kurdish New Year, to not go out due to potential clashes on the streets. The German Consulate and German schools in Istanbul shut down for two days ahead of the weekend due to a threat, and so the streets were…
What is your writing routine? What does it look like when you sit to write? Any special rituals? I am so glad you asked. It’s really pretty great. I sit at my computer, and I check Facebook for, like, ten minutes. Okay, haha, twenty minutes. And then I write. Sometimes I outline, sometimes I do…
I first met Jennine on the dance floor in a barn on a summer night at Breadloaf. Or at least I like to remember it that way. She’s an electric person, both in the flesh and on the page. She says the unexpected, and also the uncomfortable and necessary. She’s equal parts funny and fearless, irreverent…
I’ve always felt that AWP* could be livened up by a conference-long game of Paintball Assassin. Until that happens, here’s some other stuff to try: The Book Fair Bartering Game: Start with free swag. Something cool, like a box of matches with a chapbook cover on it. Find the bored grad student tending another booth….
Writer’s Butt is a real and tragic thing. You might be making great progress on that novel, but is your seat getting wider with every word count goal? Is your back so tight that when you stand up your arms are permanently locked in that T-Rex typing position? Time to stretch out and get the…
Recently, I was reading The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov’s antic retelling of the stories of Faust and Pontius Pilot. The novel follows—in part—the devil and his deranged retinue, including a bipedal cat and a naked woman, as they wreak havoc on Moscow. The edition I own, translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor,…
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