Issue #26

Some excerpts from Issue 26:

What I learned from reading so many novels is that the novel, as it goes on, has to expand. It has to give you a sense of a larger life, not just the story you’re dealing with, no matter how well it’s told. Thee must be a sense of resonance, a sense that in that story is the knowledge of a whole larger story whose presence is felt..—Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson

I want literature to being as moving as it was to me when I first read it. If it’s not moving, we might as well go write advertising or design CD-ROMs or something. I want what I do to matter later on, not just fade out of consciousness.—Rick Moody, interviewed by Tim Hohmann

It’s that vast desert of the middle that can be so intimidating to the novelist.—Patricia Henley, interviewed by Andrew Scott

I used to be really obsessed with an almost symmetrical, formal structure, and I was less willing to let the unconscious or associative patterns dominate form…I’ve been more willing as I’ve gone on to let myself be surprised, to include things like silence and uncertainty and self-referential discussion about the nature of writing to come in and create forms that are a bit more open. —Mary Gordon, interviewed by Charlotte Templin