Capturing the Drive-By Truckers on the page
…returning to Memphis to record their 12th studio album, The Unraveling. By now, Hood and Cooley are increasingly writing of national concerns — mass shootings, the border crisis, income and…
Rob Nixon discusses writers, activists, and the challenges of the Global South
…Agent Orange. Slow violence is pertinent to environmental justice because the incremental unfolding of threats to human and environmental health is experienced unequally by wealthy and impoverished communities. Time can…
Bradley Sides’ debut collection delivers sincerely strange stories
…banter over email, casually mentioning hunting for sustenance, but readers don’t understand why until the story reaches its fever pitch. “Commencement,” narrated from the perspective of a graduating class, captures…
Ed Tarkington talks about the class conflicts at the heart of his second novel, The Fortunate Ones
…functioning according to two fundamentally different perceptions of reality. Early on, I realized that my story was really about two distinct worlds — alternate realities, if you will. My narrator,…
In Alice Randall’s Black Bottom Saints, a dying man eulogizes the “Black Camelot” of mid-20th-century Detroit
…an initially confusing device that unfolds slowly to reveal a deeper layer of story. Of course, the real-life Randall gave herself this assignment. She spent years poring through Ziggy’s columns…
Bobbie Ann Mason gives her heroine a second life in Dear Ann
…for an imagined alternative: Stanford University, in sun-glazed California. Mason drives us down a Route 66 of fantasy, back to the Summer of Love, marijuana brownies and be-ins, the Beatles…
