Read a story or an essay:
LitHub Romance Finely Aged: On the Unique Dynamic of Older Couples
“Of all the wonderfully apt images in Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, my favorite has to be the one that describes the seventy-four year old Olive and the widower Jack Kennison—lying on Jack’s bed together in the book’s final scene—as “two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together.” It’s such an odd, unappealing, vaguely sweaty picture of two elderly people, and yet it floors me every time I read it because of what comes next: “such holes they brought to this union—what pieces life took out of you.”
Such holes. I love that. As a description of the accumulated difficulty and complication of a life, it seems to me to be so much more accurate than our stale and worn-out notion of “baggage.””
LitHub How Do We Write About Political Crisis and Personal Conflict?
What struck me most forcibly, watching events unfold at the Capitol in January, was how long it had taken us to really grasp what was coming—to fully accept that the rise of violent ethnic and religious nationalism in faraway places like India or Turkey or Myanmar had also arrived in the United States and Europe. It made me think of something George Orwell said, back in the 1940s—that “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
For me, writing fiction is an attempt to see the world a little more clearly, and I’ve been thinking and writing about nationalism and nativism for a while now, trying to look at what’s in front of my nose through the lives of my characters.
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Granta Gospel
Oh, will you look at his hair!
Like a funny kind of helmet – like mine, only smaller. And the ears – my very own jug handles.
His feet, of course, are yours. No doubt about that. And he definitely has your nose.
‘Half you,’ I whisper, stepping over the straw to your side of the crib, ‘half me.’
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Granta An extract from West
The whole thing had lit a spark in him.
For half a day he’d sat without moving.
He’d read it a dozen times.
When Bess came in from the yard wanting to chatter and play, he’d told her to run along, he was busy.
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Granta Notes on Craft
I was struck, recently, by something Colm Tóibín said after watching the film adaptation of his novel, Brooklyn: ‘On screen it looks complete, as if it was always there, but you are the only person who knows how tentative it was.’
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Granta Crossing Borders
I’m in New York this year, working on a novel about the settlement of the American West, and like everything else here since the morning of 9 November when Donald J. Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States, it’s impossible to think about it without considering what, if anything, his election has to do with it all.
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Bookanista Miracle at Hawk's Bay
Matthew High. We knew it would be him. Even before Hannah turned him over, we just knew it.
It was Annie who saw him from the road. “Look,” she said, and when she pointed at the dark shape out there in the shallow water, there was only one thought in all our heads – please God, let it not be him. Let it be any of the others but not him, not Matthew High.
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Prospect The Redemption of Galen Pike
They’d all seen Sheriff Nye bringing Pike into town: the two shapes snaking down the path off the mountain through the patches of melting snow and over the green showing beneath, each of them growing bigger as they moved across the rocky pasture and came down into North Street to the jailhouse—Nye on his horse, the tall gaunt figure of Galen Pike following behind on the rope.
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Granta Jubilee
Standing now at her shoulder, no longer caring much about his future, Arthur Pritt began to speak.In a quiet voice he apologized for the tediousness of the day, for the marching bands and the pipers, for the choirs and the speeches and the dreadful cacophony of the morris dancers on the cobbles; for the boring gifts. In a whisper he told her he wished they’d been able to conjure something new for her, something splendid and fascinating and unthought of instead of the dull nonsense she must have seen a thousand times before in a thousand other places.
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Literary Hub The Quiet
His name was Henry Fowler and she hated it when he came.
She hated him sitting there for hours on end talking to Tom about hens and beets and pigs, filling his smelly pipe with minute pinches of tobacco from a pouch in his cracked sheepskin waistcoat, tamping down the flakes with his little thumb, lighting and re-lighting the bowl and sucking at the stem, slurping his tea and sitting there on the edge of his chair like a small observant bird, and all the time stealing glances at her and looking at her with his sharp eyes as if he could see right through her.
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Electric Literature Creed
My story, Creed, is available, along with an introduction by David Constantine, for subscribers to Electric Literature.
She could see Creed’s place now, up ahead, not more than another three quarters of a mile.On the big flat stone at the top of the path she stopped to rest, pushed back her sticky hair and wondered again what he would do when he saw her – what he would say and how he would be and what he would look like too, close-up, after all this time.For years now, for most of her life, she’d seen him only from afar, mending his walls or checking on his sheep or coming down off the high fell with a bucket to the spring above the waterfall, a bulky hatted figure.
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PowellsBooks.Blog West
I have been thinking a lot about woolly mammoths for a while now.
In my novel, West, my hero, Cy Bellman, a 35-year-old widower and mule breeder from Pennsylvania, leaves his home and his only daughter to travel into the wilderness beyond the frontier to look for them. The year is 1818, or thereabouts, and all Bellman knows is what he’s read in the newspaper — that mysterious giant bones have been turning up in a Kentucky swamp, sparking rumors that the vast animals they belonged to might still be alive somewhere in the west.
An essay about some of the historical background to my novel, West.
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Wales Arts Review Populism, the Pandemic, and the Power of Literature
None of us knows yet what our damaged, economically poorer world is going to look like, but one of my biggest hopes right now is bound up with one of my biggest fears – that populist nationalism will not only continue to rise, but become more entrenched and widespread.