John McManus is a novelist and short story writer. His fourth book of fiction, the story collection Fox Tooth Heart, was published in 2015. His first book, the story collection Stop Breakin Down, won him the Whiting Writers’ Award in 2000, and it was at this time that collectedstories.com spoke with him.
Ha Jin (pseudonym of Xuefei Jin) is an award-winning Chinese American poet, novelist, short story writer, and professor. He currently teaches at Boston University. He taught at Emory University when the following interview was conducted.
Like the main character, Glory, who infuses most of the 21 stories in the collection Glory Goes and Gets Some, author Emily Carter moved to Minnesota, which she labels in the book as “land of Ten Thousand Treatment Centers,” for drug rehab.
Dagoberto Gilb’s Woodcuts of Women (Grove Press) is a collection of lust stories. Set in the author’s native Southwest, they are tales of working class men and women struggling to find redemption through one another. They dance the dance of fear and bravado, hope and betrayal, and straight up physical need. As often as not, desire is expressed most acutely in the emptiness of failure and the solitude of loss, but these characters never really fall to despair.
If you thought the shortest form of fiction was flash fiction, also known as the short short at anywhere from some 200 to 1500 words, then chances are you haven’t come across the work of Richard Kostelanetz; he writes single-sentence fictions, stories composed of one to three words, or even of numbers and of line-drawings, as well as fictions with only three words and a period to a page.