In remote highlands of Albania, a young man fulfills his responsibilities in a long-running blood feud then hunkers down to face his own retaliatory murder after a customary thirty-day truce. As he awaits his fate, he catches the eye of a honeymooning couple from a more sophisticated locale, to devastating effect. Similar to…(Read More)
In an unnamed empire, all of the citizen’s dreams are collected, sorted, and interpreted in a sprawling central fortress, with the goal of identifying “master dreams” portentous of the Empire and monarch’s future. Young Mark-Alem initially feels lucky to have scored a job there. This Kadare novel was banned in Albania upon…(Read More)
“It means being able to see the forest for the trees, while still knowing the sound of the wind through their branches in deep winter, the color of their leaves in autumn, their smell in early spring. It means being able to recognize the universal that will make a story meaningful to others, while retaining…(Read More)
“In journalism, immediacy is a valuable commodity. The journalist doesn’t want facts to become clouded by reflection. But literary fiction, the genre I write in, is about reflection.” In “Tools: The Power in Writing Where You Aren’t” for the e-zine Women Writers, Women’s Books, I wrote about the place of place…(Read More)
“From the day Jane walked out our front door — taking everything of value she could stuff in her car, except our seven-year-old daughter, Shoshana — the ferrets began appearing in our backyard.” Sometimes neighborly relationships are not so neighborly. To read the rest of this new short story, “The Beauty Secrets of Cave Dwellers…(Read More)
“From the day Jane walked out our front door — taking everything of value she could stuff in her car, except our seven-year-old daughter, Shoshana — the ferrets began appearing in our backyard. Every evening, they would creep through the straggling peonies and rustle the black-spotted old-fashioned roses. Before long, once night fell…(Read More)
“From the day Jane walked out our front door — taking everything of value she could stuff in her car, except our seven-year-old daughter, Shoshana — the ferrets began appearing in our backyard.” First lines of a new short story, “The Beauty Secrets of Cave Dwellers,” now available in The Saturday Evening Post. To read…(Read More)
“Basically, I was a four-year-old insomniac creating novels in my head.” In this interview with Romilly Golding for Bwritr Sarl, I found myself chatting about all sorts of things unintended. To read more, please look here…(Read More)
Wildacres
by
Delighted to have been invited to spend two weeks in April of 2022 as a writer in residence at the Wildacres Retreat and Conference Center, high up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. A cabin of my own, no connectivity, and hours of quiet and solitude (but for the wild turkeys, deer, squirrels, and the occasional…(Read More)
Radio Télévision Suisse invited me to come down to their studio to discuss the work of 2021 Nobel Laureate in Literature Abdulrazak Gurnah. What a pleasure! For years, I’ve been recommending the Zanzibar-born, UK-based author’s work and teaching excerpts thereof — so delighted to see Gurnah receive this recognition and…(Read More)
