Story Street Writers
Floodlines by Saleem Haddad is an ambitious and heartfelt novel following an Iraqi-British family of artists from 1950s Baghdad to the summer of 2014 in London, Dubai, and along the Tigris River.
In the summer of 2014, three estranged sisters, Ishtar, Zainab, and Mediha, are forced together when their late father’s artworks are rediscovered.…
In the isolated town of Five Poems Lake, the sun has been slowly disappearing for 12 years, but now a new sliver is missing each day. As the town cools and plunges further into darkness, the people must face their impending deaths until individuals’ heads begin to transform, erupting into balls of light, becoming their own small suns.…
When was the first time a book broke your heart? Is its memory still vivid enough to pinpoint where you were, what time it was, the moment that the crest of emotion forced you to put the book down for several deep breaths? …
As writers, we often desire to close the gap between our characters and readers. We want readers to become so engrossed in the characters’ lives that they forget they are reading. This gap between the reader and the text can widen when the author uses an indirect characterization method.…
Recently, a statement in a BBC article by Hephzibah Anderson about the all-important first line of a novel caught my eye: “We frontload our expectations, insisting that a handful of words must contain the DNA of all that is to come, encapsulating the conflict of a 300-page story.”…
When my son, Nick, was in high school, his English teacher asked the class to write a brief essay about their summer vacations. Reading aloud, one of Nick’s friends ended his paper with, “I had a lot of fun.” His teacher asked the student if he could think of a better word or phrase to express “a lot.”…
Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Kappa is a wonderland journey through Kappa Land narrated by Patient No 23, who has found himself in an insane asylum following his adventures. (My copy is translated by Allison Markin Powell & Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda.)
I have wunderworld projects on my mind these days – stories about adventures Elsewhere, in downstairs underworlds peopled by the dead or next-door wonderlands inhabited by curious characters.…
As a writer, I’m always keen to dissect a story to see how it works. More than that, I want to pinpoint the difference between a great story and a world-class story, the kind that’s anthologized and taught for generations.…