Something New Under the Sun

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, as well as a nonfiction book of film criticism. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, the Paris Review, Tin House, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He has recently been at work adapting American Dream Machine for FX Networks. Photo by Lisa Jane Persky.

Matthew Specktor

Not Your Grandfather’s Hollywood Novel

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

The Mythmaker Gazes at Himself: A Conversation with David Leo Rice

Heather, the Totality

A Preoccupation with Consciousness: Matthew Weiner’s “Heather, the Totality”

John Freeman Gill on His New York Novel, “The Gargoyle Hunters”

Pure Fruit

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

After the Tall Timber

A Dissident Writer in Modern America

"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them." — Federico García Lorca

Nonfiction

<h4 class="normal">Stefan Kiesbye has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. Born on the German coast of the Baltic Sea, he moved to Berlin in the early 1980s. He studied drama and worked in radio before starting a degree in American studies, English, and comparative literature at Berlin&rsquo;s Free University. A scholarship brought him to Buffalo, New York, in 1996. Kiesbye now lives in Portales, NM, where he teaches Creative Writing at Eastern New Mexico University. His stories and poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and his first book, Next Door Lived a Girl, won the Low Fidelity Press Novella Award.</h4>

Stefan Kiesbye

<h4 class="normal">Toby Barlow is a writer who lives in downtown Detroit. He is the author of&nbsp; the critically acclaimed novel Sharp Teeth. </h4>

Toby Barlow

<h4>Block is a Los Angeles writer of over 32 novels, including&nbsp;Weetzie Bat,&nbsp;The Rose and the Beast, The Hanged Man, Wasteland, I Was a Teenage Fairy,&nbsp;and&nbsp;Pink Smog.&nbsp;She has received numerous awards, including the prestigious&nbsp;Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award, and her work has been translated into many languages. Her latest novel,&nbsp;The Elementals, published by St. Martin's Press, is available now.</h4>

Francesca Lia Block

<h4>Susan Straight is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at University of California, Riverside. Her latest novel is Between Heaven and Here.</h4>

Susan Straight

Halloween Fiction Roundtable

The Sliding Door: Matthew Specktor Interviews Paris Review Editor Lorin Stein

Impersonating Ourselves

Mentors: James Baldwin

The Cows

The Cows: A Rumination

"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry." — John Cage

Poetry

Joan Didion Blue Nights Alfred A. Knopf, November 2011. 208 pp.

Blue Nights

Positions of Privilege

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, as well as a nonfiction book of film criticism. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, the Paris Review, Tin House, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He has recently been at work adapting American Dream Machine for FX Networks. Photo by Lisa Jane Persky.