I read the first half of Dust Bunny City (Disorder Press, 2017) at a party, while I was sober. Men were playing darts, making tiny dart holes in the rented apartment walls. I watched them throw darts and cheer and try to teach me how to play, and then drunkenly play with the dogs in the house and then went back to my reading.

What I like most about the story is that the grossness makes way for the sadness.

Grodstein is the author of four previous books, including the New York Times bestseller A Friend of the Family and the Washington Post Book of the Year The Explanation for Everything. She was kind enough to answer some of my questions regarding OUR SHORT HISTORY, out now from Algonquin Books.

I’m fascinated by the idea of nonlinear time — that linear time is a construct we use to make sense of the world. Now, maybe without linear time we’d all be mad. But I find great comfort in accepting the idea, intellectually, that linear time isn’t necessarily real. 

The night after my book launch at Power House Arena in Brooklyn, I slept over at my friend Logan’s house in Clinton Hill. In the morning as she dressed for work and I bemoaned stupid shit I’d said

BESTIARY was released in October of 2016 by Graywolf Press and has garnered a great deal of praise, including being longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award in Poetry. Kelly was kind enough to answer a few of my questions via email regarding the notion of self in poetry, how trauma and grief can manifest in art, and how her critical work informs (or fails to inform) her poetry.

I've been a Kevin Wilson fan since his debut story collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, first found it's way into my hands, one way or another. I've been reading and re-reading the

I had written a few aborted short stories before, but really I specialized in aborted novels.

The stories in Virgin blew me away with their strange sexy intelligence and overall aliveness.

As the real world feels increasingly devoid of magic, we are correct to admire those writers who attempt to interject some magic back into it.

Within its pages, the reader is invited to discover those wondrous things that only great short fiction can offer: an abbreviated window into disparate lives, intense and intricate moments of distress and disclosure, completely self-contained and executed in twenty-five pages or less (Deagler on Gustine's Collection).

I only want to read erased fucking.

The Millennial aspect is important because, like many Millennials, its protagonist does not wear labels easily.

I was retroactively making a story out of a time in my life when I was interested in writing, wanted to ‘be a writer’, but didn’t necessarily have the skills or direction to actually pull it off.

But the true malevolence of Majka’s world—the thing that traps her characters in a state of lifelong discontent—most often manifests in mundane hauntings: regret and remorse, vanished love and vanished youth, feelings of dislocation and the inability to belong

Christopher Boucher’s new novel, Golden Delicious (Melville House), is a kind of referendum on all we presently hold dear in fiction. Its emotional hold on the reader is very strong, but its avant-garde methods critique those special effects by explaining what they’re doing to your feelings while they do it, which somehow only makes the book more sad.

The goal of short fiction is up for debate, but it seems to me that, if a story has a single job, it is to subvert the expectations of the reader.

Likely I’ll fail to properly introduce Zachary Tyler Vickers’ debut, Congratulations on Your Martyrdom!, so I’ll make no fancy words about it: this collection of interconnected stories—comprised of

I want as a reader to be transformed and thrown off balance by what I read, and I try to do that for my reader as well.

I’m pretty sure very few people fantasize about being burned at the stake, but I do think there’s something fantasy-like in a witch burning – putting a ‘dangerous’ woman in a submissive pose, publicly humiliating her, watching her scream and writhe as her clothes and then flesh burn away.

You interviewing me for Hobart is pretty much the peak of my hustle. Maybe this is me selling out. Maybe this is growing up. 

I first came to know Miles Klee when I published him in my anthology, Watchlist: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest (a beautiful brand new edition of which is out this May from Catapult with

The third episode of Louis C.K.’s new series, Horace and Pete, is a nearly hour-long conversation between Horace (Louis C.K.) and his ex-wife, Sarah (Laurie Metcalf). Conversation really isn’t the

Eventually, I turned to memoir because I wanted to stay in scene. I craved space. I believe in the connection between poetry and memoir. It’s no coincidence that some of our best memoirs have come from poets: Mary Karr, Nick Flynn, Lucy Grealy, Mark Doty, Maggie Nelson, and Sarah Manguso—that list could go on-and-on.

According to my parents, I was obedient from birth—I emerged in silence and then slept through the night. I was just never interested in rebelling—even as a “punk,” I got good grades and was always home by curfew.