“You write in your time. You are of that time,” said Tess Gallagher in a 1999 interview. She was speaking of her 1976 award-winning Instructions to the Double, often lauded... Read More

Ogden Walker—biracial, former Marine, sheriff’s deputy, main character in Percival Everett’s latest novel, "Assumption": a man who prefers fly fishing to firearms and... Read More

At the heart of David Szalay’s exquisite yet maddening novel "Spring" is a love story. What’s exquisite is the writing. What’s maddening is its inconclusiveness. The... Read More

Each year, Graywolf Press publishes the winner of the Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction, and neither the publisher nor the Breadloaf Writers Conference (which administers the Prize)... Read More

Shann Ray’s debut story collection has already won the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference Bakeless Prize. “The sentences in this book,” writes contest judge Robert Boswell,... Read More

Melanie Rae Thon, award-winning author and professor at the University of Utah, writes about the desolate, the despairing, and the lost in her new collection, In This Light.... Read More

Civilization is the opposite of barbarism; however, it must be widespread and not exclusively for the educated or rich. It indicates not only material prosperity, with shared... Read More

America in the late 1950s and early 1960s wasn’t an easy place or time for a “misfit” to come of age. Margaret Marcus was an unpretty, unpopular, and very bright Jewish... Read More

It is as alien as one might suppose, Life On Mars, and yet there are familiarities—David Bowie, head cocked; Universal Studios, prolific as ever. In her third collection of... Read More

A title like "Otherwise Known as the Human Condition" sets expectations of broad strokes: one imagines an encyclopedic knowledge of humanity. To his immense credit, Dyer... Read More

This is lawless country. The terrain of these stories is the West, the prairies and fields of small-town America, where working the gravel pits or freight yards is as high as... Read More

“The empire of facts will have its say,” Mark Slouka says. “Although Octavio Paz may have been right when he suggested that Americans have always preferred to use reality... Read More