fiction

Dennis Vannatta tells a story about confronting one’s past—and then one’s future.

Rita Willet tells the story of Guy and his unconventional journey to baptism.

Two women whose strategies for living a meaningful life conflict vie for ownership of an antique family barn.

Marilynne Robinson’s novels have become almost synonymous with loneliness, but solitude here remains entangled with a less acknowledged trope—an enveloping and dazzling darkness.

A bathroom rendezvous ends in karaoke.

Flannery O’Connor insists that good fiction must be grounded in place; in this essay, Andrew W. E. Carlson discovers that the same can be said for church.

I A dilapidated yellow ice cream truck parked outside the fenced microwave tower, about a mile outside the tiny township of Cisco, Illinois. Aside from the few silver grain silos and the blinking elevator at the Co-op in town, the buzzing tower was the only vertical sign of human progress in the expanse of corn, […]

Ron Hansen’s fiction is tight and rich. Each of Hansen’s writings carries a certain arc: the plains of the American West, the sanctuary of a hushed convent, and the frenzied deck of theDeutschland are both terse and beautiful, places where redemption is particularly fitted to each character’s peculiar, compelling humanity. In this interview, Hansen talks […]

Young reviews Gina Oschner’s critically acclaimed novel THE RUSSIAN DREAMBOOK OF COLOR AND FLIGHT, with an eye to how the novel’s post-Soviet characters mirror Young’s own experience living with her missionary family in Latvia.