Essays | The Center for Fiction

A Week After 11/9

In this essay, novelist Anne Landsman talks about growing up during South Africa’s apartheid, how her Jewish parents quietly fought xenophobia...

The author of Sparta reflects on a master of the short story form.

Fallujah, Aleppo, Gaziantep. These are all cities that we hear about in the news, but we don’t think about the stories contained within them

The author of Sparta responds to V. S. Naipaul.

I was twelve years old in 1975 when I first heard the beautiful and haunting Michael Murphy song “Wild Fire,” which is about a ghost woman...

Stan Burnett can offer quite a bit of insight into the life and times of former Prime Minister of Italy Silvio Berlusconi because his career...

I started my micro-press, Future Tense Books, back in 1990 and I honestly had no idea what I was doing for the first few years

In this post, Claudia Casper, author of the new book The Mercy Journals, shares how General Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general who...

We asked Megan Abbott to talk about some of the influences behind her new hit book You Will Know Me. Here she discusses how a television...

I was surprised in Elizabeth Hardwick’s writing class at Barnard when she told us that the mystery of Jay Gatsby was that he was Jewish.