More on: Fiction

It is sometimes offered as a tenet of fiction that you can get away with absurdity if you do it emphatically enough, and early enough in the story. If you can seduce us into suspending our disbelief at the beginning, we’re yours for the whole ride. Kelcey Parker executes this strategy admirably in her short…

Drawing on his West Virginia upbringing, Pinckney Benedict writes fiction grounded in the Appalachians, a world of clear-eyed, dappled beauty and also of terror, violence, eeriness, and magic. Benedict’s prose is fluid and elegant, and when he wants to, he can entrance us with the loveliness of the natural world—but what interests him more is…

In her fiction, Janet Peery presides over an elegant banquet. A writer’s writer who explores themes of flight, renewal, and remaking in the American West, she writes prose that is satisfying, varied, and delicious. Her gift is for choosing the perfect image, one that imbues flesh and landscape with a dense spiritual and psychological weight,…

In both his fiction and nonfiction, David McGlynn’s great theme is youth: its pains, confusions, and glories, its energy and idealism, its awakening to the possibilities of sex and work, tragedy and betrayal, and its potential for extraordinary goodness. McGlynn is an elegant craftsman of language. His phrases, gestures, and images stay with you for…

Elaine Neil Orr tells the truth about the way modern westerners think. Perhaps because she was raised in Nigeria, she has some critical distance from the American mind. Though the language of psychology allows us to sanitize and dissect our pride, fear, hunger, and self-absorption, the ancient demons have not been eradicated. They live with…

Reading Christina Askounis is like watching an Olympic figure skater. What you notice first is the delicate, polished, graceful outward form: the energy, the movement, the invented world as bright and solid as a sheet of ice. What you don’t see, often until you’ve finished the story and are mulling it over and trying to…

In her stories about the tightly cloistered world of women in the small-town south of the fifties and sixties, Moira Crone illustrates what Flannery O’Connor called “the realism of distances”—the ability to see “near things with their extensions of meaning and thus [see] far things close up.” Crone has the born fiction writer’s ability to…

Fiction writer Tom Noyes’s people are charming cynics, clever men and women who wear their intelligence lightly; they’re as manic and nervy as they are instantly likeable. Even driving from the airport to Red Lobster, they’re a pleasure to eavesdrop on. Their smart-ass banter is laced with theology and cultural criticism—but these stories have more…

Novelist, essayist, and playwright Elizabeth Dewberry writes unflinchingly about the traumas of abuse, betrayal, and manipulation inside marriages and families—but her stories never devolve into self-pity or preachy, moralizing pabulum. Her protagonists struggle mightily to escape from bad situations, not merely on the strength of an abstract notion that our purpose in life is to…

No one writes about the misfortunes of the body quite as wryly as Valerie Sayers, who describes herself as a “cheerful hypochondriac.” In her fiction and personal essays, you meet neurotic people who you can’t help liking, loving even, as much for their unsentimentality as for their own bald nakedness about their selfishness and angst.…