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.

Here’s a statistic: After reading Brian Oliu’s Enter Your Initials For Record Keeping, I’ve spent more of my life reading Oliu than playing basketball.

In her third memoir, Belief is its own kind of truth, Maybe, Lori Jakiela uses a collage-style structure to write about the collage-like process of assembling an identity, and the particular

I've respected Rachel B. Glaser's sense of mischief for years. When I heard she'd written a novel, Paulina & Fran (2015), I was excited to see it. What the heck could it be? I thought. Was it

I just finished reading Upright Beasts. I adored it. Thank you for writing the stories and putting them together in a collection. First, I'd like to talk about surveillance, a theme that is heavy

Kilpatrick on the artist’s political responsibilities (these are apparently multiple): Hate has more borders than I can muster into the capability of a vision. That’s why I scream in short bursts. 

“Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” – Kurt Vonnegut

I met

the defining experience of Western women today is internal conflict

There were tears. When I’m writing about the past, I’m aiming to come to a place where I can feel or understand something that I’ve previously never been able to resolve. Or feel something other than anger, because anger is never just anger.

I began reading a PDF of Cult of Loretta, but stopped a few pages in. I’d already, by instinct, picked up the pen beside me several times. There were sentences to underline, pages to dog-ear. What

Last fall, Aaron tweeted something about accepting a few comics from a nine year-old. We’d soon discover the boy’s name was Alex Jiang, and that he was hilarious. When “Meet Lazy Wolf,” “Fashion