These nine engaging, well-turned essays on the writing of fiction reveal this about the author’s working methods in the first few paragraphs: “My habit, when writing about writing, is to proceed by a sort of benign plagiarism. I take... Read More

American poetry is always the better for the likes of poets such as this one, late of “the wilds of eastern California,” as he called it. Born in San Bernardino, Barnes grew up in small towns among the San Bernardino Mountains and... Read More

It can be an odd thing when reading fiction to encounter a likable story about unlikable people, and more peculiar still to come across a collection that consists almost entirely of such pieces. This cycle of twelve interrelated stories... Read More