“I’m really dark. Everything I write is dark. Most people don’t know what dark fiction is, but agents ask for it.”
Books
Author Interview: The “Friday Night Lights of Hockey” — Jay Atkinson’s “Ice Time” Turns Twenty
“Hockey gets in the blood—you develop an intense passion for the game, and either you leave it—too many early mornings, bus rides, urine-smelling rinks—or you just love it.”
Book Review: “Translating Myself and Others” — The Air We Breathe
The cumulative effect over the course of Jhumpa Lahiri’s book sharpens our view of what the imperfect art of translation can, in fact, do.
Book Review: “Building 46” — Much More than a Chinese Ghost Story
Author and journalist Massoud Hayoun’s novel Building 46 probes behind the air-brushed image of China’s capital city to offer a fascinating (and incisive) look into the everyday lives of Beijing dwellers.
Book Review: “You Have a Friend in 10A” — A Laboratory of a Short Story Collection
You come away from this volume of short stories thinking that sure, Maggie Shipstead does write what she knows — it’s just that she may know everything.
Book Review: Food for Thought, but Pie in the Sky: “Running with Robots — The American High School’s Third Century”
Running with Robots not only makes reading about education reform fun, but also prods a broad readership to think critically about how learning should work in a future guided by artificial intelligence.
Short Fuse Podcast #54: From Madison Avenue to Rikers Island
Host Elizabeth Howard talks to Mark Goldsmith about his book Madison Avenue to Rikers Island. He is the founder and CEO emeritus of Getting Out and Staying Out, a nonprofit that provides educational, vocational, job readiness, counseling, and other services to young men who have been incarcerated.
Book Review: Humanizing Our Youth — “Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age”
Throughout, Gen Z, Explained does its best to help readers relate to its protagonists by placing them in Gen Z’s shoes.
Book Review: “Woman, Eating” — A Poignant Bite All Its Own
Author Claire Kohda is particularly deft at illustrating how unacknowledged desire will out, undermining our best intentions.
Book Review: “Venus&Document” — Framing the World in Abstractions
This novel of ideas reads like an essay narrated in the first-person by a self-absorbed automaton.