I spoke to Stephen at a moment when our most imminent trouble seems to be the global pandemic of the coronavirus, one that—on the date of our interview, March 18, 2020—appears as though it will only grow worse and more deadly here in North America and around the globe...

Ricardo de Avila would have followed Coronado to the ends of the earth. Instead, Ricardo found the end of his mortal life, and a new one, as a renegade vampire...

In "Docile," the debut novel by K. M. Szpara, people pay off family debts by working as indentured personal assistants to the ultra-wealthy....

As Maya Rodale notes early in this interview, romance novels tend not to get the same respect as other categories of fiction, historical or otherwise...

Grass’s aim is nothing less than to demythologize the American Midwest.

Griswold grapples with a world that is fracturing at its foundation. In this series of poems, all at once dark. humorous and questioning, the author moves from the familiar to the unjust to hope with a keen eye...

Laura Waterman talks about her novel, Starvation Shore (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), which relies upon memoirs, letters, and diaries to reconstruct the life of the Greely Party as it attempted to survive impossible conditions...

Stein weaves a narrative tapestry whose threads are drawn from the archives of one Sephardic family, with roots in the city of Salonica, then in the Ottoman Empire, now Thessaloniki in Greece...

To catch the people who killed her environmentalist father, the main character of Karl Schroeder’s "Stealing Worlds" (Tor Books, 2019) disappears into a virtual world of overlapping LARPs—live action role-playing games...

Dark's essays take on self-improvement, self-acceptance, sexual attraction, language, aging, queer visibility, fashion, family, femininity, feminism, yoga culture, airplane seats, and the vilifying of fatness in the name of good health, among other compelling topics...

An orphaned young woman disguises herself as a boy in order to escape the dangers of being alone in 1870’s San Francisco...

How does the world of book reviews work?

Choi explores queer, Asian American femininity through the lens of robots, cyborgs, and artificial intelligence...

If you live in America, chances are good you’ve heard the term “mental health crisis” bandied about in the media...

What does the future hold for the Midwest?

In the fantasy medieval land of Trea—a conservative society that despite its worship of the goddess Amur respects her human daughters only as wives and mothers—eighteen-year-old Berona has limited expectations for her future...

Young provides a lyrical exploration of cultural encounters in the Pacific Northwest...

In 1916, Adana Moreau’s parents are killed by American Marines. She flees to Santo Domingo and then to New Orleans. There, she marries a pirate...

When Nino Cipri entered the Dzanc Short Story Collection Contest, they had no expectation of winning, so when they won, they were shocked...

Prechtel introduces the unique stories he heard when he lived among the Tzutujil Mayan people in the village of Santiago Atitlan in the Guatemalan highlands...

A combination of Charles Kuralt and Lawrence Ritter, Balukjian’s work examines 14 baseball players pulled from a pack of 1986 Topps baseball cards...

Mark Reese’s recent translation of Abdullah Qodiriy’s 1920s novel "Bygone Days" brings an exemplary piece of modern Uzbek literature to English-speaking audiences...

As "Gifts for the Dead" opens, it is 1911 and the heroine, Nora Sweeney, is waiting for bad news in Hoboken, NJ...

Sarah Kozloff does her world building gradually and carefully, introducing you to a few characters you get to know and care for, before moving on to other lands and cultures...

Some war stories emphasize heroism and a higher purpose; others emphasize brutality and disillusionment...