In April, we ran our first ever "Hobart expert picks" for the 2011 baseball season. With the season just now over, we thought it would be fun to revisit our picks, and the season in general. Here

Its been quite a few years since I first met fellow Michigander Davy Rothbart. I, a bookseller in Seattle. He, a collector and presenter of found objects, the man behind FOUND MAGAZINE, a

Dark Sky is a fine new publisher whose books are strange and stunning and uncommonly good. Their most recent release, Ryan Ridge’s kinetic collection of short stories, Hunters & Gamblers,

The epigraph to Alex Shakar’s Luminarium could be a request or a demand; “Lead me from the unreal to the real.” For Fred Brounian, it is a plea. Fred finds himself in the middle of “a spiritual

Julia Wertz's first two books are called Fart Party, a great, attention-grabbing title. I remember grabbing the book off the shelf at the comic bookstore, poking my boyfriend and laughing

Exley, Brock Clarke’s third novel, is the story of Miller le Ray, a boy whose father may or may not have left Miller and his mother to go and serve in Iraq.  Told from Miller’s point of view — and

Memory is its Medium: 
A Conversation with Bradford Morrow

Bradford Morrow's latest novel, The Diviner's Tale, uses some tropes of the traditional murder mystery and elements of the

Editor’s Note:

The following interview was sent to Hobart unsolicited and un-pitched. It was also un-emailed. I was sent it through the mail, and it was the only file on a 3 ½”

Once upon a time, there was a journal called Monkeybicycle. There is, of course, still a journal called Monkeybicycle, but there used to be one, too. And way back when, one of the guys editing that

One of the things that initially got me excited about The Orange Eats Creeps, before I had any notion of what it actually would be, was the incredible list of “inspirations” you compiled in

Is the world ending? Do you know something I don't?

I'm not sure what I know that you don't, but certainly nothing in re this. And yes, the world is absolutely ending. It's just a question of

We have a protagonist who traipses about Budapest with a copy of Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth; we have the chord pulled on a jukebox playing “Strange Fruit” in a bar called Eve and

A Conversation with Laird Hunt (cont'd)

(read part one of the interview here)

THE REIFICATION OF FICTION
 

Ruland: When last we talked, you recommended some

I was thinking about your book and its readers, and I thought about how there are three audiences. One is very large: people who have never met you. The second is very small: people who have known

A Conversation with Laird Hunt

A criminal operative helps a woman fill her shelves with mundane objects. A gentleman with psychic powers reflects on the days before his wife went insane. A

(Editor's note: this month, I asked a former Warren Wilson classmate of mine, Anna Clark, to – in a virtual setting – sit down with two other former classmates on the occasion of the publication of

AMY: Hello, Victor. Thank you for agreeing to talk with me again. As with our last interview, I'd like to start with a quote — not from Bruce Campbell this time, but from the epigraph of your

The drinking life has been rendered in print on so many occasions, it seems unlikely that anyone could find anything new to say about it. It seems unlikely, but then Patrick DeWitt's

Molly Gaudry yanked me back from a depressing precipice. For the past three weeks I've been immersed in the world of Cormac McCarthy, climbing inside his mind via his newly opened archive at Texas

Kyle Beachy's debut novel The Slide is the kind of first novel that makes you happy for the presence of books in the world. It's weird and wild and hilarious and touching all at once. This book

I first read J. Robert Lennon in a short-lived lit mag out of Philly called Night Rally. I picked up a copy of the first issue at Borders after a Michael Chabon reading in October 2000, and

Larry Fondation is the author of four books, all of which display his mastery at quilting micro and short fictions to create large bodied tales.

His latest collection, Unintended

Jedediah Berry's first novel The Manual of Detection came out in February from the Penguin Press to uniformly awesome reviews from places like the New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, The

NOTES ON GRIM TALES

 

I see the dates on the work go from 1996-2004. Were these written one by one and then later compiled in a certain order? How did the construction process for Grim

Joe Meno is the author of six books, most recently the story collection Demons in the Spring and The Boy Detective Fails. His new novel, The Great Perhaps, is out in May.

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