"You should see the deranged scraps of paper I used to track the characters’ ages; playing around with time when you have four close-together siblings as characters is not for the faint of heart!"
Hannah Thurman has a masterful command of her subject matter and the complexities of a family drama in her first novel, Mercy Hill, set in an aging mental hospital in Raleigh, N.C. Here's our @literaryhub conversation. Link in comments.
ICYMI, My @literaryhub conversation with @lizstroutauthor about her new book, The Things We Never Say, and her new protagonist, Artie Dam. Link in comments.
After creating literary immortals like Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, and Bob Burgess, Pulitzer Prize-winning author @lizstroutauthor is back with her eleventh book, which contains a multitude of new characters, centered around Artie Dam, 57, a self-deprecating high school teacher beloved by his students who seems woven into his small-town community, but who, as the book begins, feels so lonely he is suicidal. Our @literaryhub conversation explores the process of writing this new character. Link in comments.
In my Literary Hub conversation with Helen Benedict re her new novel, The Soldier's House, which chronicles the legacy of the Iraq War in fiction, Benedict notes, "D.H. Lawrence once wrote, ‘War is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters.’I turned to fiction because I, too, wanted to follow a war home to the heart.” Link in comments.
