For the seriously literary, his name and work will be familiar. His short story, “Substitutes,” earned him an O. Henry Prize in 2009. Other short works have been published in Zoetrope: All-Story, Threepenny Review, Five Points, Fence, to name a few. He has a page...
“Enemy aliens” is an all too familiar label, although just who gets thusly labeled seems to change with the political winds. With such an aggravated election year, these two words won’t be disappearing from the media anytime soon. Beyond our northern border, our Canadian neighbors did...
Spanning 17 titles over a quarter century, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has published books for every possible type of reader, including Grandma and the Great Gourd for the youngest, the three-volume Brotherhood of the Conch trilogy for middle grade/young adults, Black Candle for poetry lovers, Arranged Marriage for short story enthusiasts, and eight...
Meredith Russo: Sharing Secrets Not until Meredith Russo was in her mid-20s did she finally begin "living as her true self." Russo--a transgender woman born and raised in Tennessee, and now the mother of two children--has an unforgettable, timely story to tell. Russo's protagonist in her...
Jung Yun’s Twitter profile reads: “Fiction writer. Late bloomer. Better late than never.” Indeed, more than four decades passed before she earned that “fiction writer” mantle, but clearly the careful gestation paid off. So wowed was Yun’s publisher, Picador, with her first novel that hundreds of...
Here’s a ‘did you know …?’-fact about the Smithsonian Museums … they’re all free, all the time. That’s not the case in many museums around the country, so the Smithsonian created Museum Day Live!, an annual event in which participating museums across the country open...
Alternate histories have been "a thing" for decades. Lauded titles are many, but World War II-related novels in which the so-called good guys don't win seem to have yielded quite a few bestsellers through the decades, including The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, Fatherland...
To become a writer, Yiyun Li left behind everything familiar: her birth country (China), her first language (Mandarin), her family (parents and sister), her scientific training (immunology), and her PhD degree (University of Iowa). On the other side of the world, she switched into the...
Freshly back from the Jersey Shore, debut novelist P.S. Duffy talks about writing her first book at age 10 although she didn’t publish her first novel until she was 65, her inability to ever return to her birth country of China, and how a stranger’s...
“Define moral certainty”: The Great War in P.S. Duffy’s The Cartographer of No Man’s Land “Moral certainty.” “Righteous anger.” “God’s retribution.” The Great War implodes humanity in “No Man’s Land – a cratered landscape of ruin” in P.S. Duffy’s first novel. Published in October 2013 when Duffy was 65, The...
“This man who once saved your life, he is not a bad man. Nor a good one,” a mother writes her daughter. “I have long given up on what it means exactly to be either. But I am confident now that you must know one...
When Samantha Young swoops out of her father's dry goods store still angry from the news that they will soon be leaving Missouri for California – the exact opposite direction from New York – she couldn't possibly have realized that her life would literally be...
Having lived most of my life in cities, being temporarily stuck in a small ski resort town in the Wild West has been quite the challenge. Whenever I leave Dodge, I seem to take a good percentage of the diversity with me. When – shall...
I was bad. I couldn’t keep up with my chaotic new year and kept missing deadlines. Thrity Umrigar got so fed up, she basically said, “This happens now, or not at all.” So you better believe I got my act together long enough for one...
Thrity Umrigar: “It’s a good time to be a writer” Perhaps I shouldn’t admit so blatantly to literary-personality preferences, but I must confess here: Thrity Umrigar is my very favorite person to run into at (dreaded) literary conferences. I know from experience how irreverently entertaining she can...
Thanksgiving approach-eth! Don’t you want to know what will be on the Urban Forager’s table? Read on! Ava Chin, author of recently published Eating Wildly: Foraging for Life, Love and the Perfect Meal, chats about family, motherhood, writing, and the art of foraging – complete with...
Eating Wildly for the Belly and Soul with Ava Chin These days, Ava Chin is living her happy beginnings: she’s the mother to an energetic toddler, wife to the man of her dreams, professor of creative nonfiction and journalism at her undergrad alma mater, and – whenever...
The title of Paula Young Lee's latest book (her fifth) is Deer Hunting in Paris. The subtitle, which announces it's a memoir (her first), includes two very loaded words, "God" and "Guns." The sub-subtitle explains further: "How a preacher's daughter refuses to get married, travels...
Blame it on family, on the country-of-residence-at-the-moment, on the tumultuous politics of her motherland of Nepal, but certainly Manjushree Thapa has lived a life in flux, repeatedly adjusting to unpredictability. Born in Kathmandu, she moved as a toddler to Canada (young enough to acquire English...
Ellen Oh, author of the acclaimed Prophecy trilogy – starring a third-century, yellow-eyed, teenage supergirl demon slayer – is channeling her own colorful fighting spirit. Two-thirds of her series, Prophecy and Warrior, are available now. King hits shelves this coming December. In the meantime, Oh herself has gone...
