More on: Fiction

In her fiction, Christine Lehner attends to the human body. With great tenderness, she uncovers a gothic beauty in the body’s failures, illnesses, and longings, a beauty inseparable from its frailty. But her stories are as intellectually nervy and alive as they are grounded in the physical. From wheelchairs and hospital beds, over family dinners…

Beth Bosworth has the knack for making you fall in love with ornery characters—bookworms, oddballs, prickly and eccentric folks. Never far from a sense of life’s tragedy and loss, she nevertheless observes the world with a keen and earnest intelligence that by its very alertness, its very engagement, contains its own hard-edged joy. Her new…

For our friend Dan Wakefield, author of How Do We Know When It’s God?, finding novelist Peggy Payne’s work was love at first sight: “I wrote Peggy Payne a fan letter the first time I read any of her work—a chapter from her novel Revelation, one of the most moving and memorable works I’ve read…

Diane Glancy is a Christian writer of German and Native American extraction. She explains her writing by pointing out that she works in the in-between: between genres, identities, systems of belief. Her work reminds us a great deal of Richard Rodriguez’s recent book Brown, in which he praises mixture—the movement of the distinct into the…

As a writer and thinker, Virginia Stem Owens is a combination of Texan toughness (a la Ann Richards and Molly Ivins), intellectual curiosity (think Annie Dillard and Stephen Hawking), and literary grace (part Studs Terkel, part Graham Greene). In short, she is a lady of parts. Her writing spans the gamut from explorations of the…

Ingrid Hill’s stories are teeming—they are lush with richly imagined selves, telling details, and close observations. Her individual stories are so different from each other that she’s not easily identifiable with a particular region or culture—she has the chops to write about any place she wants—but the common thread in these stories is the way…

A.G. Harmon’s A House All Stilled, which won the Peter Taylor prize for fiction, has just been published this month by the University of Tennessee Press. While Harmon is known to the Image readership for his frequent book reviews and his excellent interview with novelist Oscar Hijuelos (in issue 22), it is wonderful to see his…

Keep an eye out for Gina Ochsner. Her first book, the weird, vivid, and intimate story collection The Necessary Grace to Fall, won the Flannery O’Connor Award last year, and no wonder. Set in far-flung locations, her stories make distant things present and real, never exotic or gimmicky; this is the real stuff, real stories…

Novelist Hwee Hwee Tan uses dialogue the way Bach used melodic lines, weaving disparate elements for the sheer fun of it—she blends the ancient and modern, Singaporean and British, high culture and low. She has an ear for human speech, the way it betrays our histories, governs our present encounters, and shapes what we become.…

Some of McGraw’s work is featured in Image issue 5, issue 73, issue 75, and issue 87. Read an excerpt by McGraw here. Biography Erin McGraw is the author of two works of fiction, Bodies at Sea (1989) and Lies of the Saints (1996), which was listed as a Notable Book for 1996 by The New York Times.…