Rarely is the pain of losing someone expressed with such directness, energy, and, yes, humor. The grief in Evan Kuhlman'sWolf Boyis palpable, and so ….

There's a great Anton Chekhov quote. He says, "The Russian loves recalling life, but he does not love living." That scene has always been something t….

I write when I have something to say and not when I don't. My time is better spent if I know I have nothing to say. I don't consider it writer's bloc….

A collection, for me, is a book of very diverse stories that somehow speak to each other, across wide geography, across time, years, decades..

Alexis Coe rescues a buried but extraordinarily telling episode from the 1890s that resonates in all sorts of ways with today. That in itself would b….

I write by hand in my notebooks and number the drafts, so I know how crazy I can get with this. Some writers, like my teacher Marilynne Robinson, she….

I agree with the Lev Tolstoy quote completely, but I also feel like there's more to it. What is a happy family and an unhappy family? We're probably ….

John Colman Wood's The Names of Things is a thoughtful, patient, and ultimately rewarding book. It's about, among many other things, the connections ….

I've spent a lot of time in prisons, first doing legal work and later, teaching..

Everybody, doesn't matter who you are, escapes time. And for me, nothing is stranger than the thought that kids are just kids. Nobody is just anythin….

A stellar, fully-realized collection of stories... grounded, wonderfully, in the river valleys of western Maine. You come away not only understanding….

Actually, you’re not famous at all. Maybe you’ll get some traction after you’re dead?.

Like no other writer in contemporary American literature, Brock Clarke has a way of looking at us, I mean looking straight at us--warts, lots of wart….

I think anything we do - eating, walking down the street, online shopping - gives you another perspective on writing stories..

Maybe my work is somewhat divided into family stories, things I know intimately, and then everybody else in the world - the strangers who I am totall….

People have to follow their own strangeness. The minute they start making their own vision of the world flattened out so everyone can read it, they l….

I beat a story to within an inch of its life - that's when I know its done. Not before, not after..

I usually have a location and then I put the character there. I love place names. I think I'm tricking myself by being so specific - it suddenly beco….

I'm constantly trying to figure out how to crack that mystery; how to make a novel that has a sense of immediacy of a short story. I try to do that a….

To me, and I'm sure for other writers, too, characters come back and they relive again, but what about those characters who only live for a page or t….

I've spent so many years living in one place and imaging another..