“Texas has produced no major writers or major books,” wrote Larry Jeff McMurtry, rather despairingly, in 2011. He was being modest. McMurtry, who died in 2021 at 84, was himself an undisputed titan of the Lone Star State and a wildly prolific one at that. During his lifetime, McMurtry published 33 novels and a baker’s…

I find the holidays a good time for horror. Whether the festive season makes you happy or miserable, you can read about people who are (hopefully) in more immediate and serious trouble than you. If your family has gathered, as so many do at the holidays, you can finish the last page of a novel…

In the spring of 2020, I was beating my head against the fourth draft of a novel that wasn’t working. Provisionally titled The Change, the story juxtaposed the acutely existential crisis of postmenopausal life against the backdrop of the chronically existential crisis of climate breakdown. My protagonist and first-person narrator, Rachel Calloway, was a 53-year-old…

The following is by Mahmoud Shukair from The Common Issue 23, highlighting Arabic short stories from Palestine. Shukair was born in 1942 and writes novels and short stories, and has authored 74 books to date. Shukair was awarded the Mahmoud Saifeddine al-Irani Short Story Prize in 1991, the Mahmoud Darwish Prize for Freedom of Expression in…

Roxanne Coady talks with Heather Cox Richardson, the bestselling author of Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, in which the historian and author of the newsletter Letters From An American explores the roots and complexities of American democracy, the challenges we face in the present, and the potential paths forward. Subscribe and download the episode,…

Novelist Timothy Schaffert joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss how the concept of farce relates to today’s GOP-controlled House of Representatives. Schaffert describes the lack of self-awareness in both fictional and real-life characters, including politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, and analyzes how it renders them comical, absurd, and maddening…

This week on The Maris Review, Casey Plett joins Maris Kreizman to discuss On Community, out now from Biblioasis. Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts. * from the episode: Maris Kreizman: I really love how you talk about treating strangers in this book. Which, you’re a trans woman, you have every…

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I always wanted to be a writer. But you can’t really specialize in creative writing in America until the graduate level; studying English is as close as you can get. So I did. I took almost every literature course my high school offered, then majored in English Literature at college. But I never quite fit…

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Nov. 30, 2023) — University Press of Kentucky announces a new publishing imprint Screen Door Press which will be edited by award-winning and critically acclaimed author Crystal Wilkinson. Dedicated to discovering unique, exceptional, and varied voices within Black literary traditions, the imprint will celebrate the very best in fiction — short stories, novellas and novels —…