Kathleen Alcott

Jun 24, 2024 | memoirland.substack.com | Jeneé Skinner |Richard Kelly Kemick |Lynne Tillman |Kathleen Alcott

Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by , now featuring four verticals:Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “Smoke,” by . The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing.

Jun 17, 2024 | theparisreview.org | Kathleen Alcott

By Kathleen Alcott June 17, 2024 I was a fairly unsupervised child, living like a rat on the crumbs of adult culture, its cinema in particular. 1976’s Taxi Driver I saw for the first time at eight—rented and shown to me by a housemate of my mother’s—and what I remember most is the gamine Jodie Foster at a diner’s laminate tabletop: her cheer, and her will, her fistfuls of prostitution money.

Dec 19, 2023 | electricliterature.com | Carmen Machado |Kathleen Alcott |Alissa Nutting |George Saunders

In talking about my debut story collection, House Gone Quiet, with friends and family, I’ve often found myself pitching the merits of the short story form itself. Due to habit or book marketing or a lack of exposure, it’s simply the case that most fiction readers who enter a bookstore are typically on the lookout for a novel (You can trust me on this one, as a former bookseller myself).

Nov 17, 2023 | nytimes.com | Kathleen Alcott

The ShortlistIn new collections by Yiyun Li, Claire Keegan, Alexandra Chang and Lore Segal, interpersonal bonds are created and destroyed. Nov. 17, 2023, 5:02 a.m. ETThe short-story writer “can’t create compassion with compassion, or emotion with emotion, or thought with thought,” Flannery O'Connor wrote.

Nov 3, 2023 | harpers.org | Kathleen Alcott

Toward the end of my life in New York, a decade and change I would dispense with as casually as I’d begun it, came a season of psychic misery that felt as vertiginous, as alarming and noiseless, as a winding drive along a cliff—the windows sealed shut against a danger still visible. My acupuncturist, Christina,1 might have been the only person who knew how truly I had wanted to stop living.