Recommendation: Ms. Soppe’s work is nuanced and vivid, distinguished by a strong voice, a bold, experimental style, and wonderfully long sentences. In "The Pantyhose Man," the narrator is the collective spirit of the women who answer phones at a large Midwestern hotel. What begins as a comic account of how these women contend with obscene…
Recommendation: “The Quarrel” is a brilliantly written, searing glimpse into the life of Staszek Czyzowski, Polish survivor of World War II camps, and his ruined wife, Kasia. The writer’s exquisite portrait of this stubborn, furious man, rendered without a bit of sentimentality, is so devastating it takes my breath away each time I reread it….
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…
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…
Recommendation: In haunting ways, Alicia Conroy’s “Mud-Colored Beauties of the Plains” not only recalls Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” in its sense of a mythic past beset by modern society, but it steps back a page. Conroy’s story springs from the source of creation—the mud bed of “fluvial life from amid tree…
Recommendation: I’m proud to nominate Patrick Michael Finn, one of my most accomplished, prolific former students and one of my favorite writers. Mr. Finn remains someone I talk about quite often, though he graduated in 1997, and someone whose stories have never left my mind. I still remember his characters—lonely Joliet teenagers struggling with religion and…
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…
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