Jane Ciabattari

1 week ago | lithub.com | Jane Ciabattari

Feature image © Sarra Fleur Abou-El-Haj. Article continues after advertisementThere are echoes of Virginia Woolf throughout Honor Jones’ masterful, exquisitely crafted first novel Sleep, which explores the ways in which a childhood trauma haunts her main character, Margaret, and those around her.

3 weeks ago | lithub.com | Jane Ciabattari |Karen Bender

My last Lit Hub conversation with Karen E. Bender was in 2018, just before her collection The New Order was published. She mentioned that she read John Cheever’s short stories in graduate school: “Cheever’s sentences just made my brain light up. He packs more into a paragraph—about love, longing, loss, mortality—than most writers can fit into an entire story or novel.

1 month ago | lithub.com | Jane Ciabattari

Jemimah Wei’s mesmerizing, emotionally engaging first novel, The Original Daughter, which is set in Singapore in the years between 1995 and 2015, arrives this week after a journey of more than a decade. She was born and raised in Singapore, where she launched a blog in 2007, worked in advertising and was a social media influencer. She started the novel in 2014. Five years later she came to the US as an MFA graduate student at Columbia.

1 month ago | lithub.com | Jane Ciabattari

Guadalupe Nettel and I first met in Berkeley at the 2017 Bay Area Book Festival, where she appeared on a panel I moderated honoring the centennial of the birth of Juan Rulfo, the Mexican writer who is considered the father of magical realism. He had a transformative influence on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who compared him to Sophocles, and ushered in the Latin American boom.

1 month ago | lithub.com | Jane Ciabattari |Lydia Millet

Read Lydia Millet’s fiction from her first novel, Omnivores(1996) to her new short story collection, Atavists, and you’ll trace an evolutionary arc of American culture from the Home Shopping Network to AI and LARP. There are consistencies through the years—climate change, bodybuilding, birds, dinosaurs, disjointed relationships, for instance—but her work never feels repetitive. Instead it feels inventive, as she keeps pushing further into her universe.