By
Gregory McNamee
on
January 27, 2017
Mikhail Bulgakov
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.” So says—well, the devil, or at least an earthly representative of his Luciferness, in Bryan Singer’s 1995 film The Usual Suspects. But what if the devil were to appear on Earth and not be terribly shy about making his presence known? That’s the provocative premise of Mikhail Bulgakov’s much-loved novel The Master and Margarita, which first appeared in book form a quarter-century after the ...
Talking to debut novelist Andrew Hilleman
By
Claiborne Smith
on
January 24, 2017
Photo courtesy Kyle Gilbertson
When debut authors talk about their struggles to get published, their stories usually boil down to a dramatic tale of numbers, despite the literary context: X number of writing workshops they attended, X number of years spent working on the debut, X number of rejections from agents or publishers. Andrew Hilleman, whose electric, compelling debut novel, World, Chase Me Down, is out today, has numbers that are more memorable than most. This 332-page novel based on the real-life kidnapping in ...
Spotlighting some of my favorite new fiction
By
Laurie Muchnick
on
January 20, 2017
What better way to start a new year than by reading new writers? Here are excerpts from our reviews of some of the most exciting debuts being published this month, two first novels and a book of short stories:
Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke: “In this aptly named story collection by an Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean heritage, people living in various countries struggle to build better lives for themselves....Clarke fully inhabits the voices of her characters—a masterful feat ...
Interviewed by
Poornima Apte
on
January 20, 2017
Courtesy Lisa Grossman
King Grossman had just returned from participating in the Dakota Access Pipeline protests when Kirkus caught up with him. His desire to become an active citizen informs the backbone of his debut indie venture, Letters to Alice. The novel has a feel for the zeitgeist of our times with Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring woven into its threads. The book’s protagonist, Frazier Pickett, an editor whose writing ambitions have been mostly quashed, is a “slumbering man,” somebody ...
Interviewed by
Megan Labrise
on
January 18, 2017
Rachel Hulin photographed by Brett Henrikson.
Fancy a Dangerous Liaisons-styledelicacy? Rachel Hulin’s epistolary debut features some lip-smacking secrets between brother and sister.
“I love epistolary novels,” says Hulin, author of Hey Harry, Hey Matilda. “I always try to think about how to get that voyeuristic voice without letters...but it just feels like you’re not getting in there. I really want to be in someone’s head. I want to feel like you know this person deeply and you know their secrets.”
Matilda and ...
Interviewed by
Megan Labrise
on
January 17, 2017
Courtesy Park Jaehong
Han Kang’s fierce, fresh fiction has the book world abuzz: The Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated from Korean to English, won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. It is one of “The 10 Best Books of 2016,” according to the New York Times Book Review.It is ripe with searing imagery that won’t soon leave you. So, too, is Human Acts—a second, related novel now available in English thanks to The Vegetarian translator Deborah Smith. In ...
Interviewed by
J.W. Bonner
on
January 16, 2017
Courtesy Siemon Scammel-Katz
In the beginning is the word—not a person, self, or character. And so it is with the newest work of fiction by Rachel Cusk. Transit, her latest novel, is the middle novel of a trilogy that began with 2015’s Outline. In Transit, after a divorce, the narrator, Faye (whose name, as with so many traditional fiction markers, is largely absent in Cusk’s treatment of her), has moved to London with her two sons, though the shabby state of the council ...
Interviewed by
Stephanie Buschardt
on
January 11, 2017
Courtesy Lucky Tucker
Despite its title, there’s not a lot of happiness going around in Mary Miller’s new collection, Always Happy Hour. “There is nothing more disgusting, really, than people enjoying themselves so thoroughly when you’re miserable,” writes Miller in the book’s opening story, a rather grim yet appropriate introduction to the morbid hilarity that’s to come in the following pages. More than eight years have passed since the release of Miller’s first collection Big World, and after having tackled the art ...