“Maybe everything you ever lose just makes room for what really belongs in your life”: An Interview with Bud Smith

I should preface this interview by saying that I’m pretty biased. I think that Bud Smith is one of the coolest, most generous, most consistently wonder-driven writers alive. Maybe the most. I also know him fairly well. A few weeks ago we drove around in a car for far too many hours, reading our books at places in Pennsylvania and West Virginia and North Carolina. Bud messed up while making the road trip playlist, so it ended up having the […]

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Broken Glass: Fragments on Addiction and Kaveh Akbar’s “Portrait of the Alcoholic” and Michael Schmeltzer and Meghan McClure’s “A Single Throat Opens”

A few months ago I dangled my feet over the edge of the roof that sat just above my partner’s apartment in the city – which can only mean New York – and listened as she told me she was worried about my smoking and my drinking. I treat my body an odd way. Each morning I wake up and run 6 to 12 miles. 50, 60, 70 miles a week. I pour it on, run hard, derail. I believe, […]

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“I Can Still Feel It Looming Over Me”: Joe Halstead on West Virginia and “West Virginia”

Joe Halstead’s West Virginia is a moody wild ride of a novel. Dark, momentous, soulful, deeply human – the book turns the mind inside out, questioning the places we live and the reasons why we both leave them and come back. There’s angst and doubt, loss and grief, insecurity and arrogance. It’s the whole mess of the human condition, all wrapped up in city life and Appalachia. In Giovanni’s Room, one of Baldwin’s great novels, Baldwin writes, “Perhaps home is […]

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Talking Emily Books With Ruth Curry

I received an advance copy of Jade Sharma’s Problems, due out from Emily Books, one of the first titles released since their recent partnership with Coffee House Press. I finished Problems on the train, the book’s popping prose totally in line with the how it feels to be underground in New York City – a rush of light before darkness, a blur of movement. Unsettling, aware, self-conscious, vivid, honest, gorgeous – Problems does it all, all while eschewing traditional expectations […]

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