More on: Fiction

We wanted to lead off with our own handsomely crafted description of Larry Woiwode’s genius as a writer, but we’re going to step aside for a moment and quote what John Vernon once wrote in the New York Times:“Woiwode is an American original. He writes with a sense of both the quicksilver movement of language…

Elizabeth Tarver’s subject is all that is noble and ridiculous about the modern south—in particular, her longtime home of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. In her short fiction, she tweaks the absurdity of pride, the pressure of convention, and the small-mindedness of insular places—but always with deep sympathy and imagination for the emotional lives…

Throughout his fiction, Rubén Degollado devotes himself to one American family, the Izquierdos of the Rio Grande Valley on the Texas-Mexico border. In the valley, and in this family, a microcosmic clash of ancient and modern world views takes place: old world Catholicism and Evangelical Christianity, fast food, pick-up trucks, healers, curses, television wrestling, and…

On the eleventh anniversary of her joining the Image staff as Managing Editor, we are delighted to ask Mary Kenagy Mitchell to step out from behind the curtain and take a bow. When we first met Mary in 2000, Image had just moved to Seattle, her home town. She was a newly-minted MFA from the…

A true radical in an age of drab verisimilitude, Suzanne Wolfe subscribes to the notion that the language of literature ought to be beautiful, and that it might therefore sound different from the language we use in our status updates. Her style is marked by long, elegant, even somewhat baroque lines. She is not afraid…

In genres as diverse as short story and memoir, nature essay and manifesto, Scott Russell Sanders’s prose is consistently propelled by a concern for the well-being of the world and the people who inhabit it. And whether he is describing the distinctive beauty of his southern Indiana hometown or the resilience of a wounded twenty-something…

The protagonist of Sara Zarr’s recent novel Once Was Lost, Samara Taylor, is the teenage daughter of a pastor who leads a small congregation in the desert of eastern Oregon. In the midst of a series of traumatic events “Sam” develops a fascination for xeriscaping, the art of creating a garden that needs only a…

Melissa Pritchard’s stories often cross an invisible line—between normality, as we usually define it, and, well, the not-normal. The line might be on the border between the erotic and the holy, between wisdom and folly, perhaps even between reality and fiction. In short, Pritchard has a way of knocking the reader off balance. And yet…

Melanie Rae Thon has an imagination that turns no one away. For over two decades now, she has published short stories and novels that take us into the worlds of people who, in the course of everyday life, we might cross the street to avoid. With great tenderness, she draws out the stories of outcasts…

Caroline Langston has a liturgical sense of life. A convert to Orthodoxy, her writing honors ordinary repetitions, always with an openness to their potential to bear grace. She writes of life as a reader, neighbor, wife, and mother, of the rhythms and rituals of her DC neighborhood, of the daily tasks of caring for a…