Rowan Somerville was born in the West End of London in 1966. He was educated by Jesuits and took an honors degree in Literature from the University of Edinburgh. He has since recovered and worked in film, television and radio and he now lives in Paris and various parts of Ireland. He has published two novels The End of Sleep (W.W. Norton, 2008) and The Shape of Her (Phoenix, 2008). We encourage you to email him (see below).
Posts Tagged ‘Issue 4’
Interview with Margaux Fragoso
An interview with Margaux Fragoso, by Krystal Anada Sital
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Fragoso plumbs the depths of the human condition with her first book, Tiger, Tiger. It has stopped people in their tracks; readers have been outraged by the portrayal of a perpetrator, a pedophile. She has shown us, through the eyes of her child-self, how human a pedophile truly is. Continue reading "Interview with Margaux Fragoso"…
Helen Phillips
An interview with Helen Phillips, by Reese Okyong Kwon
Maybe it was the mouse carnival that did me in. Or was it the factory where virgins are made, or grocery shopping with Bob Dylan, or could it have been the moment when a man turned into a rainstorm? Helen Phillips’s debut collection of one-page fabulist stories, And Yet They Were Happy, is thronged by wonders. It is the work, as Amy Hempel has said, of a “deeply interesting mind.”
Helen is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the Meridian Editors’ Prize, and a Ucross Foundation residency. Her work has appeared in the Mississippi Review, PEN America, and Salt Hill, among others. She lives in Brooklyn. Helen and I went to college and graduated school together, and this interview took place over the past month.
—Reese Okyong Kwon Continue reading "Helen Phillips"…
Emma Straub
An interview with Emma Straub, by Miranda Popkey
Emma Straub’s debut, Other People We Married, is a story collection to be savored. Read it too quickly and you’ll run the risk of missing the small moments that come to shape Straub’s characters and her stories. A subtle shift portends a larger upheaval; a small jab becomes emblematic of a deeper rift; a word said or unsaid derails an entire conversation. Those moments—identifiable in life only in retrospect, when everything is irrevocably different—when things begin to change, are Straub’s strength, and their accumulation is one of the virtues of Other People We Married. (Straub’s sharp characterization and cool, clear sentences can be counted among the many others.)
Interview with Helen Phillips
Maybe it was the mouse carnival that did me in. Or was it the factory where virgins are made, or grocery shopping with Bob Dylan, or could it have been the moment when a man turned into a rainstorm? Helen Phillips’s debut collection of one-page fabulist stories, And Yet They Were Happy, is thronged by wonders. It is the work, as Amy Hempel has said, of a “deeply interesting mind.”
Helen is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the Meridian Editors’ Prize, and a Ucross Foundation residency. Her work has appeared in the Mississippi Review, PEN America, and Salt Hill, among others. She lives in Brooklyn. Helen and I went to college and graduated school together, and this interview took place over the past month.
Story Theory: Confessions of a Literary Darwinist
By R. Salvador Reyes
First confession. I didn’t start out this way: believing that art is a Godless domain, a tactically-consumed, evolutionarily-wrought siren to the mind—just another victim hunted by our massive, pulverizing desire to devour and catalog every pattern in the universe that presents itself to our perpetually-ravished brains. I didn’t believe any of those things. Not in the beginning. Continue reading "Story Theory: Confessions of a Literary Darwinist"…
Letter to the Editor: A Homecoming
By Samantha Ecker Angerame
It feels strange to look at an old photo, one taken long before you or your parents were born, and recognize something. It’s a disconcerting feeling that uproots you from your present life. Suddenly you find yourself in a faraway place that feels antiquated and remote—but it’s also eerily familiar. You realize that you once knew it very well. Continue reading "Letter to the Editor: A Homecoming"…
Re-Reading Hobby Horse Hill
Hobby Horse Hill came into my possession by way of my mother, who herself had read it as a girl. At perhaps eight, I discovered it in a box with dozens of her other childhood favorites. Of all of them, only Hobby Horse Hill became important to me, so much so that I read it dozens of times. At one point I could recite the entire opening chapter by heart. Even now, certain lines or scenes will occur to me spontaneously: a sudden embarrassment, for example, will bring to mind the idea of having “the grace to be ashamed,” which one character says approvingly to another, and which I thought, at eight or nine, was romantic.
Issue #4, Spring 2011
Issue #4, Spring 2011
Peter Mountford
An interview with Peter Mountford, by Sunil Yapa
After graduating from college, Peter Mountford lived in South America working as a “hack economist” (his words) for a right wing think tank. Since then, he’s been writing fiction. A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, his debut novel, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt this month. David Shields, usually no fan of fiction, said that the book “is, quite simply, one of the most compelling and thought-provoking novels I’ve read in years.” Jess Walters compared it to Graham Greene, writing, “A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism is a terrific debut novel—smart, moving, beautifully written.” Set in Bolivia in 2005, following Evo Morales’ election as president, the novel charts the journey of a young American, Gabriel Francisco de Boya in his mission to turn a profit for a notoriously unscruplous hedge fund. Peter and I, friends since we were both waiters at the summer literary conference, Bread Loaf, talked over Skype, drinks, and email.
Continue reading "Peter Mountford"…