Margaret Renkl

September 11, 2012 During its twenty-year history, the Oxford American has become famous for two things: brilliant writing and recurrent turmoil. Founded by editor Marc Smirnoff in 1992, the literary magazine has always struggled to maintain solvency, shutting down more than once, seemingly for good, only to be revived again months later when Smirnoff somehow managed, against all odds, to secure more funding.

September 7, 2012 Novelist Steve Stern grew up in Memphis, though not in the Pinch– an old Memphis neighborhood that is often the setting for Stern’s fiction and was once the city’s Jewish ghetto. Stern was in his mid-thirties when he returned to Memphis, after more than a decade away, to work in a Memphis folklore center and discovered the Pinch. The Yiddish culture and stories he found there gave him the focus and material he needed to write.

May 25, 2012 It’s tempting to begin every update on novelist Jay McInerney—who’s most famous for his 1980s debut novel, Bright Lights, Big City, though he’s written seven other books since—with the words, “Jay McInerney is back in the news this week….” But, really, when has Jay McInerney not been in the news?

May 22, 2012 As professional baseball’s only starting knuckleballer, R.A. Dickey, the New York Mets pitcher, is no stranger to the nation’s sports pages, but this spring he’s showing up on the book pages, too, thanks to his new memoir, Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball (written with New York Daily News sportswriter Wayne Coffey).

May 21, 2012 Abraham Verghese is a Renaissance man for our multicultural age: an American citizen born in Ethiopia to Indian parents from the Kerala region, he is a physician who trained in New York and Tennessee (and practiced in Texas and California), an author who studied at the legendary Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a Syrian Christian whose Hindu ancestors were converted to the faith by the evangelizing of St. Thomas himself. In most ways, this fluid sense of identity has served Verghese well, informing a vast array of essays, memoirs, and journal articles, as well as one sweeping novel, Cutting for Stone, that spans several continents and has a page-turning plot most often compared to the work of John Irving.