Now you’re probably wondering, what’s outside, right? And also, who the hell is Hugh Howey? This is good; this is normal, these are good questions. Let’s begin by answering the last question first. Howey is many things: an ex-yacht captain, a master story-teller and probably, the Internet’s best kept secret. But WOOL isn’t Howey’s first…

Dina Gachman is the founder of Bureaucracy for Breakfast, a blog that pokes fun at the crazy shit rich people do (because we all need a hearty laugh now and then, especially when the economy is put-put-puttering along like a broken train). Ms.Gachman took a bad experience (getting fired from her job) and transformed it…

Sometimes you read something and you enjoy it. Sometimes you read something and fall in love and know, know, that it’s only the beginning. That’s the experience I had when reading Kat Dixon’s chapbook, Don’t Go Fish. I had read her e-book, Kississippi, and was hooked, but if that was just a taste, Don’t Go Fish was a few good bites.…

Serendipity ­— as it happens randomly, appears as if it were planted for you before you arrived. A waiter carries a tray of ice water, bumps against a woman. The water tumbles. A relationship is born. A lawyer browses the book store stacks for George Bush’s memoir, and next to it, a misplaced volume of…

Squawk Back was formed during the summer of 2011, by editor-in-chief Zak Block, and several of his friends. Our mission hasn’t deviated too radically from that with which we initially set out: to, in a sense, publish the unpolished, and polish the unpublished. Though Squawk Back does feature the work of published authors, some up-and-coming,…

Why not? Nothing else seems to work. But then again, what writer would give up her depressive muse? Good literature – not just cathartic scribbling – It has been produced by some of the most lonely people of the last one and a quarter century. I don’t have to supply my own references, for Norris…

Steve Williams: Free Food for Millionaires is one of the catchiest titles I’ve ever heard. Can you talk a little bit about how you decided on this as a title for your novel? Min Jin Lee: Years before I started the book, a friend who worked on Wall Street told me a story about how…

The first time I read some of my writing out loud in front of people I almost peed my pants. You see, the story was embarrassing and it was about me. I write creative nonfiction, which means there’s no hiding behind a safe filter of a fictional narrator. The story I read that first time…

When I submitted the unsure beginnings of a novel to my writers’ group, the wonderful Idra Novey recommended Madeleine Is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum. I was, am, interested in novels in prose poems. Madeleine Is Sleeping is written as a series of lyrical, impressionistic observations on events or characters that range from a single…

Dear Brandi Wells, It was night and we were in my room and my mattress was on the floor. A friend was sitting on it, talking about his fractured heart. Another friend was there too, licking her fingers over an empty box of pizza, empty except for the residue of grease. I was leaning up…