Category: News

266 posts in Category: News

Viewing All Blog Posts

Stephanie Dinsae and more in The Common



The Common issue #22 is here, and with it Stephanie Dinsae’s 2021 DISQUIET Prize-winning poem, “Dey.” Read it here!

In Issue #22 you’ll also find a portfolio of writing from the Arabian Gulf co-edited by Noor Naga (2019 fiction winner) and an essay by longtime DISQUIET staffer Steven Tagle, among many other things.

Joy Williams in LitHub



Anything a writer says about their work is outside the work, a stranger to it. It’s a different language. It’s almost the enemy of the work. Whatever transformational transmission of weird beauty and consolation the work might possess can be utterly destroyed by the writer talking about it on the side.

You should read this interview with Joy Williams (conducted by typewriter). Maybe you’ll like it! I did.

Out now: Saturation Project by Christine Hume!



Christine Hume’s first book of prose, Saturation Project, is now available for purchase!

“The genre-defying genius of Saturation Project brings memoir and essay to the land of myth. Here, the wildness of what we experience, that which cannot be controlled but controls nonetheless, finds expression through etherealizing and visceral saturations of the body: a feral, humming, windswept girlhood mapped with uncharted brilliance.”–Claudia Rankine

Join Christine Hume and Deb Olin Unferth for a live Zoom conversation about Saturation Project 7PM Monday, January 11!

A.O. Scott on Joy Williams



Florida comes up a lot in Williams’s work (she has written a nonfiction book about Key West). It’s a landscape of vacation homes and cut-rate amusements with a complicated gravity that expels some characters, attracts others and causes still others to sink into fragrant, hazy torpor.

But she’s equally at home in — she has in fact lived in — Arizona and Maine. She’s not really a Western or a New England writer, though. Or maybe she is, insofar as the flat, dry heat of the desert affects the restless young women in “The Quick and the Dead” as much as the humidity of Florida afflicts the listless young women in “State of Grace” and “Breaking and Entering,” and the deep, lonesome dark of a Maine winter shadows the mother-and-child odyssey in the short story “Escapes.” Her sense of place is acute, but her places aren’t steeped in history or tradition. People pass through or stop in them without always understanding or caring where they are. “It was one of those rugged American places,” a minor character in “The Quick and the Dead” muses, recalling his hometown in Washington State, “a remote, sad-ass, but plucky downwind town whose citizens were flawed and brave. He would never go back there, of course.”

You can read the whole thing here.