Interview : Kenyon Review fiction editor Caitlin Horrocks

PodcastThis week on The Missouri Review Soundbooth we talk to Kenyon Review fiction editor Caitlin Horrocks about literary magazines, reading, and dream submissions. Her first book is the story collection, This Is Not Your City. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories 2011, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, The Pushcart Prize XXXV, The Paris Review, Tin House, and One Story, among many others. Currently, she is an associate professor of writing at Grand Valley State University

Grand Valley Forum, volume 036, number 19, January 23, 2012

Grand Valley Forum is Grand Valley State\u27s faculty and staff newsletter, published from 1976 to the present

Grand Valley Forum, volume 036, number 09, October 24, 2011

Grand Valley Forum is Grand Valley State\u27s faculty and staff newsletter, published from 1976 to the present

Lanthorn, vol. 46, no. 17, October 20, 2011

Lanthorn is Grand Valley State\u27s student newspaper, published from 1968 to the present

Niñez y mujer: ruptura y libertad en cuentos fantásticos recientes

Este artículo investiga la relación existente entre los personajes infantiles, el evento sobrenatural y la vozliteraria femenina en una serie de cuentos fantásticos escritos por mujeres, en inglés y español, en losúltimos doce años. En estos cuentos aparece un evento sobrenatural, y los personajes centrales son niños.El soporte teórico principal se basó en Vladimir Propp, Hannah Arendt, Antonio Risco, Fredric Jameson yMary Eagleton. El estudio profundizó en el desarrollo del género fantástico, la escritora mujer y algunasconcepciones de niñez. En estos cuentos se alteran los parámetros físicos del mundo real y con ello seexponen los fundamentos falsos que subyacen a las nociones conservadoras y unívocas usualmenteaprobadas por las instituciones literarias, políticas y culturalesAbstractThis article investigates the relationship between children characters, supernatural events and women’sliterary voice in a series of fantastic short stories written by women in English and in Spanish, throughout thelast twelve years. In these short stories, there is a supernatural event and the central characters are children.The main theoretical frame is based on Vladimir Propp, Hannah Arendt, Antonio Risco, Frederic Jamesonand Mary Eagleton. The study provides in-depth examination of the fantastic genre, women writers and someperspectives on childhood. In these short stories the physical parameters of the real world are altered, whichexposes the false bases that underlie the conservative and univocal notions usually approved of by literary,political and cultural institutionsKeywords: children characters, fantastic genre, women’s literary voice, utopia, socio-political value

Please Don\u27t Interrupt Me While I\u27m Ignoring You

A collection of short stories and personal essays, Please Don’t Interrupt Me While I’m Ignoring You weaves a lamé of humor and private desperation on the page. An actor in one story craves career gratification, while a United Nations coordinator in another finds herself attracted to a nervous NGO. A housewife attempts to convince her husband to commit an infidelity, while an architect finds that his new pet companion isn’t helping him to get over his ex-girlfriend. Having a difficult time relating, these characters often find themselves stuck in a miscommunication loop, and their journey to get what they want is subtle. These stories are followed with essays about the author’s own experiences while he was stuck in a miscommunication loop. Driven by his obscene fear of conflict, the author chronicles what happens when conflict is inevitable. Travel and self-loathing abound in these narratives depicted with sensitivity and sarcasm—bitterness and love. Together they leave a lasting impression of the impermeability of worldly citizens, and the internalizations they have to combat to get ther

The Landscapes of African American Short Stories, 1887 – 2014

My dissertation addresses the dearth of scholarship on short stories by using quantitative data and text-mining software to explain how the repeated inclusion of short fiction by Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, and Edward P. Jones in anthologies across decades shapes the contours of African American literary tradition. My research also reveals why specific geographic locations have become, over time, fundamental to the study of African American literature

Narrative at Risk: Accident and Teleology in American Culture, 1963-2013

Accident in fiction is always inevitable. When a character in a novel suffers a car accident, for example, the accident is the effect of the author\u27s intentions, and therefore it is not accidental. The words and images that constitute the meanings and events of the text do not change. The accidents in the narrative always happen the same way, reading after rereading. Drawing from this observation, the question that Narrative at Risk attempts to answer is, in its simplest iteration: how can narrative accurately represent accident when its textual representation is not subject to the effects of accident? I ask this of a number of American cultural objects that were produced over the last fifty years, from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the present. Narrative at Risk interrogates representations of accident primarily in novels and films--but also in television, roleplaying games, comic strips, and videogames--in order to examine how contemporary American culture ascribes meaning to the accidental. I read a wide array of accidents--from mechanical failures to failed suicides, depictions of biological evolution to games of chance--as providing a broad but nonetheless coherent understanding of how American society has conceived of accident in relation to individuals, communities, and the species as a whole. Narrative at Risk, in treating media such as film, television, and videogames alongside literature, broadens our understanding of how accident developed as a danger over the past fifty years, as well as how various media influenced and shaped one another through borrowed reading practices. In the introduction, I focus on the crystallization of the mass media that brought traumatic events into American homes again and again, specifically, the moment of President John F. Kennedy\u27s assassination and the epistemological and ontological crises this event and its media coverage initiated. The first chapter reads the role of this mediation and the crises of the 1960s as they jointly inform representations of accidental mechanical failure. Through readings of four texts, I theorize a politics of accident, taking as my initial subject what Ronald Reagan called his most formative moment: his role as a train accident victim in King\u27s Row: 1941), and his discussion of this role in his 1965 memoir Where\u27s the Rest of Me? I delineate how Reagan\u27s obsession with narrating accident later shaped a politics of the accident in texts such as David Cronenberg\u27s film Crash: 1996), Don DeLillo\u27s novel White Noise: 1985), Colson Whitehead\u27s novel The Intuitionist: 1999), and Rockstar Game\u27s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: 2004). The subsequent chapter shifts from the first\u27s broad historical range to texts composed and published at the end of the Cold War: Paul Auster\u27s novel Leviathan: 1992); Jeffrey Eugenides\u27s novel The Virgin Suicides: 1993); and Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man : 1996) an episode of the television show The X-Files: 1993-2002). I read the failure of suicide attempts in these texts as accidents that express the limits of intentionality, which bring to the fore the nation\u27s inability to conceive of a future beyond the ideological bounds of the conflict with the Soviet Union that provided meaning during the Cold War. The third chapter recontextualizes the final years of the Cold War. Here I read Richard Kenney\u27s poem, A Colloquy of Ancient Men from his collection, The Invention of the Zero: 1993), alongside two novels: Michael Crichton\u27s Jurassic Park: 1990) and Richard Powers\u27s The Gold Bug Variations: 1991). Rather than depicting the futurelessness of the United States, these texts look to deep history on the scale of evolutionary time. They depict evolution as a series of random, accidental changes that take place in the history of a species\u27 development; in doing so, they together trace the Cold War fear of thermonuclear annihilation shifting to an anxiety of genetic manipulation. The fourth chapter turns to the 1970s to investigate the early years of the culture wars. I begin by reading how chance disrupts the narrative of Kathy Acker\u27s novel Blood and Guts in High School: 1984), then consider the religious right\u27s hyperbolic condemnation of chance in TSR\u27s roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons: 1974). I then scrutinize games of chance in three other texts: Michael Cimino\u27s film The Deer Hunter: 1978); Thomas Pynchon\u27s novel Gravity\u27s Rainbow: 1973); and Sam Lipsyte\u27s short story The Dungeon Master : 2010). These three cases demonstrate how chance undermines the paranoid fantasy that there are external forces authoring the world. Finally, Narrative at Risk concludes with an exploration of accident in the present through a discussion of two television shows--Breaking Bad: 2008-2013) and The Americans: 2013-)--and Steve Erickson\u27s 2012 novel These Dreams of You. Imagining accidents as the fault of the government, these texts collectively suggest American culture\u27s continued reliance upon teleological thinking and conspiracy theory

A Liberal State of Mind: Formal Reconstructions of Statehood in the Anglophone African Novel

While the idea of the nation and national identity is often taken as the starting point for examinations of the African state, this dissertation explores the transnational dimensions of the African novel and the way in which English-language writers from Africa imagine a state that more adequately captures their desire to freely inhabit a global literary marketplace. Although critics of the Anglophone African novel tend to understand the fictional state as an object of unremitting political critique (often simply as a reflection of its real-world counterpart), the African state, when viewed through the methodological lens of narrative form, becomes the distinct site of a global liberal identity grounded in a commitment to individual freedom, unfettered creativity, and humanist notions of progress. The new African novel purposefully allies itself with transnational and individualistic forms of self-identification. Pointing up the formal resonances between an earlier, politically committed, generation of African writers (Chinua Achebe and Ayi Kwei Armah) and their contemporary counterparts (Chris Abani, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Aminatta Forna, and Nuruddin Farah), I demonstrate that literary form functions as the primary nexus of the latter\u27s engagement with the idea of the state--both how to define it and what it could look like. Although the nation-building work of an earlier generation of writers inflects that of their literary descendants, such textual reciprocity also allows the African novel to foster ways of thinking about writers\u27 relationship to a global audience and an increasingly migratory authorial identity that is, perhaps surprisingly, in step with the liberatory ideals of an imagined America