Fiction

Recommendation: I first encountered Ted Weesner, Jr. and his work when I heard him read at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and also at the Pen/New England Discovery awards. In both cases I was struck by his vivid characters and by the edgy, intimate, contemporary voice of his narrators. Later on the page, I found…

Recommendation: Kevin Wilson’s stories show us a world that is both real and full of illusion. One imagines the skies that sit over these towns are always a particularly vibrant shade of blue. The characters are people we almost know, and yet their lives are heightened, peculiar, both more dazzling and more tragic than our…

Recommendation: Alexai grew up and still lives in a Chicago neighborhood known as Pilsen/Little Village. It’s the largest barrio east of L.A. The neighborhood is the locus of Mexican culture in the Midwest. It is plagued by the usual economic problems that plague most immigrations, and in particular by street gangs. What attracts me to…

Recommendation: Jeff Parker has taken two fiction workshops with me at St. Petersburg Summer Literary Seminars in Russia. I have enjoyed and admired his humorous, absurdist stories, written with a light touch, easy-going sentences, yet with a great deal of discipline and compactness. In a playful attitude, he manages to develop drama and to render…

One day, waiting for a bus, standing on a street corner in Lower Manhattan, somewhere near Canal, having completed jury duty, having in fact judged another human being and found him guilty, she thought of justice, that heavy word. As a member of the general worldwide mothers’ union, she had watched the man’s mother. She…

We found the kittens in a pile, too young to even stagger, the mother too hungry herself to feed them, or caught by the dogs. We had a big old plastic purse with a blanket inside, and we put them all in there and hauled them around in the wagon. I liked them, they were…

Sarah was nine-about-to-be-ten. The world was taking its sweet time. And she was in the world. It was Easter, but it was also Fast Sunday, because Easter had fallen on the first Sunday of the month this year, so all the meetings were in a row, Sunday school, then fast and testimony meeting, which was…

Giverny, 1907 Quickly Émile took out the green wooden rowboat to lift fallen leaves off the pond. When Monsieur would come out of the pink stucco house at six in the morning, it had to be just right. With no breeze yet, the water lay like a liquid mirror, and Monsieur would want to paint…

Recommendation: Katherine Bell’s description of what her British post World War II woman finds buried in her backyard—her tiny garden—electrified me, not by what she found but by the delicacy of the description of what she found. A real writer. —Frank Conroy, director of the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and author of…