Fiction

Recommendation: I am delighted to nominate Brittani Sonnenberg, a senior at Harvard, and a member of my Creative Writing class last fall. Brit is a joy in every way: smart, unpretentious, perceptive, and adventurous. As a member of an improv comedy group, she is used to taking risks; you can see in her work, I…

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…

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…

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…