Big Loves: Devin Murphy on Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children

Every so often a book I have yet to read makes me nervous. I think this is a self-defense wall my writer-self intuitively constructs to steer wide of new voices that may influence me when I already have my own narrative voice locked into a project. This is why I circled Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs…

Fiction Spotlight: Contributor and former Memorious Fiction Editor Ian Stansel

Ian Stansel’s debut novel, The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is fire, smoke, and bursts of illumination against the open sky. It’s classically American—a Western with some serious literary chops—and it’s everything it should be considering the July 4th, 2017 publication date. Critics and readers alike have showered the novel with praise,…

Think Music: SJ Sindu

When I talk about music I listen to during writing, I’m really talking about two things—the music I put on while I’m physically writing at my desk, and the music I listen to for the duration of a project. In other words, there’s the writing music, and then there’s the other music—the stuff I listen…

In Memoriam: The Things They Buried in the Yard

There was a story my grandfather liked to tell, and it was my favorite one for bedtime. When my grandfather was a kid, a skunk got into the basement of The Women’s Club in town, nobody knew how. He had volunteered to help, had tried to get the skunk to walk up a ramp and…

In Memoriam: Fuck Whale

Memorious is excited to introduce our new column, “In Memoriam,” in which a writer pays tribute to the memory of something or someone now gone.  For our first post, fiction writer and poet David Ebenbach tackles the complexities of (that’s right) Fuck Whale. Do you know the story of Brigadoon? It’s a movie, actually, and…

Forgotten Writers: Deborah Willis on Shirley Faessler

According to the foreword to A Basket of Apples, Shirley Faessler’s stories began as tales told around a kitchen table. Faessler ran a rooming house for actors in Toronto, and would entertain the entertainers with stories of Yankev the Bootlegger, Henye the Hunchback, and Raisel the Galloping Consumptive. This “witty and uncompromising writer”—as she was…

Big Loves: Jeneva Burroughs Stone on Sir Thomas Browne

Let’s face it: No one wakes up one day with the epiphany, “I must read Religio Medici!” Sir Thomas Browne’s works are funky, antiquated gems, somewhat obscure even for those who study 16th and 17th century English Renaissance Literature, as I did at Columbia University from 1987 – 1994. Browne clings like a barnacle to…

Brian Trapp’s Anticipated Books of 2017

Since 2010, Memorious editors and contributors have compiled lists of our most anticipated titles of the new year. Last year’s picks included Emma Cline’s masterful novel The Girls, Han King’s Man Booker-winning drama The Vegetarian, and our new Assistant Poetry Editor Derrick Austin’s Trouble the Water, which Mary Szybist selected for the A. Poulin Jr. Award….

Think Music: Robert Wilder on Foreigner

In twenty years of teaching high school, I have seen more than a few students who were clearly born in the wrong decade. After the movie Swingers came out in 1996, for instance, kids started arriving to school in zoot suits and fedoras, twirling pocket watches on chains. I’ve witnessed boys slick back their hair…

Memorious New Assistant Editors

Memorious searched high and low to find the best people to join our team. Thanks to everyone who applied. Competition was fierce and our decisions were difficult. We lost sleep. Our stomachs had issues. But it was worth the trouble: We are now overjoyed to introduce our new assistant editors… Fiction Natalie Mesnard comes to…