Fight your own war
I am sitting in this small room, two or three months from now or two or three years from now, writing a story about a number of human beings marching in a hunger parade and writing about what is going on in their minds, about all the remarkable things they are dreaming and imagining in...
Dark delights
I’VE ALWAYS LEANED INTO what’s funny about the terrible, in life and in my writing, in part as a coping mechanism, but also as a way to bring people in. If things are just across-the-board awful, it’s my experience that people stop listening and/or reading. They turn away, back to the safe mundane. But aptly...
The Hill-Country Music Contest
HE HAD PULLED INTO SUTTON shortly after sundown, rocking and bouncing down the deserted main drag. His eyes were bloodshot and he was in need of a shave. The girl on the desk at the Bedford hotel glanced up from her ledger. “You the recording fellow from New York?” she said. “John Coughlin, that’s right.”...
Pulling it all together
Writing has always been my thing. Back when I was a crime reporter in the US, picking my way across murder scenes and figuring out how to get blood out of my shoes, I was there because I wanted to write. And when I worked in communications for the British government, trying to persuade spies...
Jessica Anthony: Orbiting the brink
Set over the course of a sunny November day in suburban Delaware in the late 1950s, Jessica Anthony’s The Most dissects the hopes, uncertainties and secret desires of a married couple whose life hasn’t quite panned out as they’d hoped. Handsome people-pleaser Virgil Beckett drifted into a job as an insurance agent, but is ill-equipped...
Keep moving – and breathe…
Rachel McRady’s debut novel Sun Seekers is an emotionally resonant depiction of a broken family uniting in the face of a health crisis. It movingly explores the lasting effects of grief, complex family dynamics, the impact that a disease like dementia can have on everyone involved, and how the innocence of a child can bring...
Bookish backdrops
WHAT BETTER PLACE to set a book than in a bookstore or library? It makes sense that many authors, including myself, pay homage to these vital literary locations in our novels and non-fiction; most of us ‘grew up’ in libraries and bookstores – and chances are, many of our readers did too. I not only...
Write what you don’t know
By the time I wrote Cadenza, I had realised that the advice to ‘write what you know’ was lousy advice for a fiction writer. Part of my artistic agenda was to do something like the opposite. Writing what you know is a good way to stop your imagination before it even gets started. It’s also...
Time to say goodbye
Most people live in compromise. For me, this has never been an option. Not that I ever wanted some insipid “normal” existence, but people have said, and I suppose will always say, she did this or that “because of the accident” or “in spite of the accident.” These statements amount to the same thing: they’re...
Susan Muaddi Darraj: Origins and uncertainties
Susan Muaddi Darraj began her debut novel Behind You Is the Sea six years ago, as a series of interlinked portraits of daily life among the Palestinian diaspora in Baltimore. The stories that make up the novel are centred on three Palestinian American families who are rooted in a common identity, but whose concerns are...
From Still City: Diary of an Invasion
Still City, Oksana Maksymchuk’s debut poetry collection in English, reflects life in the wake of extreme and unpredictable violence. Drawing on sources including social media, news coverage, witness accounts, recorded oral histories, photographs, drone video footage, intercepted communication and official documents, Maksymchuk tells the shared experience of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “By calling it...
Catskills karma
In 1973 my family spent a summer in the Catskills, upstate New York. One afternoon I peeped through the fence of our front yard as a woman with long yellow hair lay down in the middle of the road. My mother said there was a house near the river where the hippies lived. They did...
