CQ: What’s your academic background? Do you have an MFA? If so, from where? Did you find it useful professionally and creatively? What has the effect on the field of creative writing been from the proliferation of these programs? CP: I … Read more

by JAKE MAYNARD Monday. Welcome to the Troublesome Creek Folk School and Resort, where classes are held in little cabins lining the creek bank. There’s one for mandolin class, another for forest foods and medicine. One each for beginner banjo, … Read more

by ANDREW DONG-HYUN KIM Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. Grand Central Publishing, February 2017, pp. 496 Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, released early in 2017, is a landmark piece of English-language fiction for a number of reasons, but perhaps the greatest of … Read more

by MATT DENIS Justin Wolfe is from Beaverdale, Iowa, and he’s the 32nd best high school quarterback in the country. “It’s a tiny ass town, man,” he tells me as we’re stretching near midfield. “There’s only, like, five hot girls … Read more

by Ben Murphy Experimental Animals (A Reality Fiction) by Thalia Field. NY: Solid Objects, 2016. pp. 264 The parenthetical subtitle of Thalia Field’s new book reads like a fallacious marketing designation—a label slapped on to tease the booksellers who have … Read more

by JOHN BLAIR . . . for charitable prayers/ Shards, flints and pebbles should be thrown on her. . . .                                                      Hamlet: Act 5, Scene 1 Ophelia, lodged, fictive and unsanctified in her Danish dirt still waits for the … Read more

by ROBERT MAYNOR I knew what my brother would do before I called him. That’s why I’d put it off for so long. JD is not a moderate kind of man, and he saw enough of women being mistreated when … Read more

by JAMES ELENS The storm washed away the town on a Sunday. Moselle lay on the eastern end of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya swamp basin, fifty miles south of New Orleans. The whole town was only a dozen homes perched lined along … Read more

by Mary Scott Manning Curbside Splendor Publishing, July 2017, 185 pp. “Sometimes when in the blast radius of some catastrophic act, even the most quotidian things, the dumbest everyday shit will still be immortalized,” admits Tim Taranto. His memoir, Ars … Read more

by REBECCA LARTIGUE Judy had overdone it again, she realized, assessing the large sheet cake; she’d be eating leftovers for days.  But it didn’t matter.  Everyone was having fun, talking in their version of Early Modern English:  “Wilt thou cut … Read more