Eleanor Catton is among the five North American authors shortlisted for the second iteration of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. The $150,000 USD ($203,971.50 Cdn) prize recognizes the best fiction book by a woman or non-binary writer from the U.S. and Canada. It is presently the largest international literary prize for women writers. Each of the four remaining finalists will … Read more
Percival Everett’s novels seem to ward off the lazier hermeneutics of literary criticism, yet they also have a way of dangling the analytical ropes with which we critics hang ourselves. His latest novel follows the misadventures of a runaway named Jim and his young companion Huckleberry in the antebellum American South. As in another novel … Read more
In your story “Neighbors,” a couple moves west to San Francisco in the wake of an infidelity, hoping to “redraw the map” of their marriage. While they are there, the husband has an eerie encounter in a neighbor’s house. These two strands of the narrative are seemingly unrelated, but, of course, this is a crafted … Read more
In “The Book of Love,” a début novel from the short-story writer Kelly Link, three teen-agers find themselves in their music teacher’s classroom in the middle of the night. They are wearing costumes from “Bye Bye Birdie,” and they remember only “a blotted, attenuated, chilly nothingness” from which they’ve slipped “one by one by one,” … Read more
In “The Time Being,” your story in this week’s issue, a young man gets entangled with an older man, a distinguished European named Mr. V., whom he thinks of as a survivor, a “subject of history.” What does the young man—our narrator—mean by that? Is it merely a quality of age, or is there something … Read more
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter. Joseph O’Neill reads his story “The Time Being” from the March 18, 2024, issue of the magazine. O’Neill is the author of one story collection and four novels, including “Netherland,” which won the … Read more
Your story “Hostel” is one in a series of stories—which will be published in your collection “Highway Thirteen” in August—that revolve around a serial killer: each story includes characters whose lives he touched or took. (The New Yorker also published an earlier story, “Demolition,” that will appear in the collection.) How did the idea for … Read more
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter. Fiona McFarlane reads her story “Hostel” from the March 11, 2024, issue of the magazine. McFarlane is the author of two novels and a story collection, “The High Places,” which was awarded the … Read more
This week’s story, “The Spit of Him,” is about a boy named Kevin who ventures out to a neighboring village and, in the process, may or may not discover a dark secret about his father. How did the idea for this story come to you? I began working on this story one night in my … Read more
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter. Thomas Korsgaard reads his story âThe Spit of Himâ from the March 4, 2024, issue of the magazine. Korsgaard is the author of three novels and two story collections, as well as several … Read more
