Diana Tappert: When developing The Art of Character, what were the first few elements that you were sure you needed to touch on? How did you narrow down these essential elements? David Corbett: I actually first formulated the content that would evolve into The Art of Character while teaching an online class through UCLA Extension’s…

I first discovered Christopher Barzak a few months before I moved to Korea. A friend of mine mentioned his book The Love We Share Without Knowing which is, among other things, about expatriation in Japan. While Japan is certainly not Korea, I thought it might be nice to get a glimpse at what I was…

I doubt that anyone would argue that the two novellas of Could You Be With Her Now are not different stories. I mean, “I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner” focuses on danger experienced by a mentally challenged fifteen year old, told in his own words. To the contrary, “May-September” omniscient tracks…

Crass. Delicate. Geometric. Spare. Ammons’ work ties up our ways of knowing the world in a textile, one that reaches beyond the view of the eye when held up at arm’s reach. It is crass because it understands the world is profane in its abundance. It is delicate because it intimately knows the bluejays, pebbly…

There are three things I like about Sightings, BJ Hollars’s debut short story collection: it’s simple, funny, and insightful. Sightings aptly begins with a quote from Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree: “It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state. There wasn’t so…

theNewerYork wants me to “Stay horny for art.” It’s right there on the back cover. Right there on the front cover, a pink-skinned mop-topped nude with rosy cheeks sits open-legged, the subject’s mouth obscured by a stark, black exclamation point which stretches down between the ample breasts and settles betwixt said open legs, barely obscuring…

In some ways, Michael Kimball’s Big Ray felt like I was reading from a dirge, a long melancholy hymn fractured into broken pieces, unified by Kimball’s troubled melody. There were too many parallels I identified with, too many details I understood too well to read this without a conflicted sense of empathy. Kimball bares all…

First published in France in 1938 and introduced to me by the wonderful Rikki Ducornet, the stories in Marguerite Yourcenar’s Oriental Tales do more than just confront the power of desire, they promote it to immense and terrifying dimensions. In Kali Beheaded, the gorgeous virgin goddess Kali is massacred by jealous fellow gods, who re-attach her head to…

I think it is natural when a publisher accepts a book of yours for publication to become curious about who else they have published. The other books they have published tells you something, if nothing else something about your work. That’s what originally got me interested in Chronicles of a Bee Whisperer by Timothy Stobierski,…

In From the Hilltop, Toni Jensen’s first short story collection, Jensen shapes worlds where grief births silence and mourning accompanies shifts in weather and landscape, making land a character, one who can feel and act humans do. Rainfall accompanies a teacher/student relation in “Learning How to Drown”; a cornfield moves from place to place, arriving near the…