Fiction Spotlight: Peter Orner

In a striking moment from the novella that caps Peter Orner’s Maggie Brown & Others (Little Brown), the main character, Walt Kaplan, hears his young daughter hovering outside the door to his study. She is watching him through the door’s keyhole. Walt goes to the door and kneels to look through the keyhole, his eye seeing,…

Fiction Spotlight: Ed Pavlić

Ed Pavlić’s début novel Another Kind of Madness weaves an intricate narrative as two people return to Chicago: Ndiya Grayson, who navigates professional life with high-end lawyers, and Shame Luther, carving out an existence as an intense temp laborer. Their reasons for leaving still not behind them, Ndiya’s chance night out and Shame’s self-taught talent…

Fiction Spotlight: Caitlin Horrocks

One of the absolute best short story collections published in the last decade, This Is Not Your City, was released in 2011 not by one of the big five publishing houses, but by the Louisville-based indie darling, Sarabande Books. The collection’s deftly precise stories had been featured in journals like Tin House, The Paris Review, Third Coast, and…

Fiction Spotlight: Joanna Pearson

The stories in Joanna Pearson’s collection, Every Human Love, are haunting. They border the realms of real and mystical, taking us down stretches of a wooded, rural highway one minute and the next, through city streets at night, a lurker watching menacingly from an alley. Characters are rendered so vividly they could be standing outside your…

Fiction Spotlight: Daphne Kalotay

Memorious contributor Daphne Kalotay was one of the first fiction writers we solicited for a story: I met her in 2004 when I handed her a postcard for Memorious at the reading series Cover to Cover, run by Steve Almond in Boston. While she did not send us a story then, she passed the card…

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,…

(Non-)Fiction Spotlight: Contributor Peter Orner

Peter Orner is the author of several books, including the novels The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown) and Love and Shame and Love (Little, Brown), and the short story collections Esther Stories (Back Bay) and Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge (Back Bay). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Literary…

Fiction Spotlight: Contributor Sharma Shields

Sharma Shields’s debut novel The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac (Henry Holt) was published in 2015—and we’re still not over it. “Imagine a mashup of Moby-Dick and Kafka’s Metamorphosis (with a hearty dash of Twin Peaks thrown in),” writes Kirkus Reviews, “and you’ll begin to get an idea of what Shields’ ambitious tale of disenchantment sets out to do.” The novel, which won…

Fiction Spotlight: Contributor Benjamin Percy

Benjamin Percy’s stunning work of flash fiction called “Revival” appeared in the seventh issue of Memorious. At the time, his second collection of short stories was due out, after his first outstanding collection, The Language of Elk. In the decade since, Percy’s gone on to publish three novels—The Wilding, Red Moon, and The Dead Lands—with a fourth…

Duped: Rob Arnold on JT LeRoy

Memorious reached out to Rob Arnold, one of the magazine’s cofounders who left the magazine in 2008,  to weigh in on the controversy surrounding JT LeRoy, an author who purported to be—among many other things—a queer H.I.V. positive former child sex worker from West Virginia, but was later revealed to be Laura Albert, a 30-something woman…