Introducing B-Sides & Rarities
For the sake of continuity or length, a lot of interesting, revealing stuff ends up on the cutting room floor. But a lot of what ends up on the cutting room floor — whether it be passages from reviews and essays or exchanges from interviews — is revealing, funny, or just plain interesting. B-Sides and […]
“I don’t think that the decisions we make when we are not under any pressure, when our lives are going well, really say very much about us.”
David Backer, who runs Fiction Daily and is a contributing editor at this site, recently told me that he occasionally describes our site to people “as the Jimmy Fallon of online literary magazines.” I’m still not sure quite what to make of this, but I’ve slowly come around to the idea — I may not […]
We’re introducing a new series in which we showcase pictures of our editors looking vaguely like a famous author! Jesse Montgomery as Thomas Pynchon! Amanda Shubert as Marilynne Robinson! Eric Jett as Jonathan Swift! Max Rivlin-Nadler as Barbara Kingsolver! Nika Knight as Lorrie Moore! Actually, this is probably the only time this will happen. A […]
The Prosperity Gospel of Oscar Wao
Or how reading Junot Diaz will teach us to pull ourselves up and out of the ongoing economic apocalypse. Just kidding. Second-rate jokes aside, Dean Bakopoulous’s piece in the Wall Street Journal, How Reading Junot Diaz Can Help America Prosper, is as moving and insightful a moral argument for fiction I’ve read in quite a […]
A Reading List from Donald Barthelme
I’ve been drawn to lists of books that authors recommend for about as long as I’ve been taking fiction seriously. Over time, this interest has evolved into something critical — a study of taste and influence — but when it began it was pretty mystical: I think some part of me felt that if I […]
We’ll be using this space for posting and commenting on links, making short observations about what we’re reading, dispatches from readings and book parties and worlds outside literature (i.e. art, film, and television), funny things we think when we’re riding the subway, lists of our favorite KISS albums (Alive! tops the list, duh), twitter feeds […]
Regarding the Future of Full Stop
The Future of Full Stop We’d like to begin by thanking everyone who has made the past 2 ½ weeks a success. None of us expected Full Stop to take off as quickly as it did, or to receive so much positive attention and kindness. Thank you.
Edan Lepucki in conversation with Alex Shephard If Edan Lepucki wrote an essay about the phone book, I would probably read it. Her work for The Millions is warm, engaging, and incredibly sharp, and her essays have helped make that site one of the best places to find quality long-form literary criticism on the web.
“Other People We Married, Straub’s debut story collection, is one of the funniest and saddest books I’ve read in some time. It’s also one of the best.”