Nonfiction

I met Noy Holland six years ago at a writers' conference at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where Barry Hannah wild man stories were still rife, though he had been gone from there a couple of years. The title of the conference was Voicelust, and Tuscaloosa, lush with boredom, marital breakup, dog racing, the…

I • THE VAST SLEEP OF THINGS 1 Carthage Is Burning If only this sleep could be wind, I told myself, a dark stirring of it out of Egypt, the wind which rots all sails and cannot rot and is beyond age-not the scirocco with its one obsession; not the chinook thawing the ice on…

Lucky indeed is the young writer who has a background like Josip Novaikovich. No shortage of something to write about. Listen. He grew up in Yugoslavia, the son of a clog-maker in a mountain town. Matters got complicated, seeing that his family was of a small group of Baptists in a Communist country that was…

In language both sensitive and terse, "Close to Autumn" explores the feelings of a motherless child. Edie is seven and long accustomed to living alone with her agreeable, devoted young father. She shyly admires his new girlfriend, too, and comes to cherish moments when the three of them can be together. But she is unaccountably…

I first met Wayne Johnson's "Red Deer" during my fiction writing class at Iowa in the fall of 1986. Among the students in that class were two young men who wrote exclusively about themes that have come to be associated with the American West. The majority of students in the class were Easterners, and they…

Yolanda Barnes comes from California. She majored in journalism and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Southern California. While she was a student she wrote for the Black student newspaper, Alluswe, and freelanced for the Los Angeles Times. After graduating, she worked at the Hartford Courant. (An outstanding athlete, she also taught, for…

The few years I've spent working with apprentice writers have given me reason to cherish surprises almost above all else. I don't know if conformism is a stronger force in the literature of our time than any other's, but certainly it is insidiously powerful; looking about yourself (in the academy or in the marketplace) you're…

The initial encouragement of publication of David Wong Louie's work should be credited to David Hamilton at The Iowa Review, where two of his earlier stories appeared. Louie has also had work in Chicago Review, Kansas Quarterly, Agni Review, Mid-American Review, Fiction International and others, and is now readying a first collection called Displacement. Louie…

In large measure, Paul Ruffin's short story, "The Fox," speaks for itself. It accomplishes what a well-made short story should, and it goes a step further and satisfies the reader with the sense that this particular author's window into his characters' lives tells its brief tale completely. I feel obliged, however, to endorse this story…