Author name: Graciela Newman

In 1976, when I entered kindergarten at Webster Elementary in Maplewood, I quickly learned that my schoolmates were far more interested in the color of my skin than of my slightly gray tooth, and in touching the short Afro I sported. Every morning, Mom styled my hair with a black hair pick with metal teeth […]

“Those people. My whole existence, neatly packed into one demonstrative adjective,” says Nila, the protagonist of Aria Aber’s pulsing debut novel Good Girl. Nila was born in Berlin, “inside its ghetto-heart, as a small, wide-eyed rat, in the months after reunification.” As these quotations show, Nila is whip-smart and undeniably witty. Yet she is riven

For twenty-­six years and five months, Olney Kartheizer worked as a staff writer and copy editor at the Anastasia, Florida, Daily Sun. He wrote book reviews until the publisher killed the Book Page. He’d been able to feature local writers who would otherwise have been ignored, like Pen Beeman, whose first book of poems, My

Acclaimed novelist Charles Baxter joins Fiction/Non/Fiction hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss his recent novel Blood Test: A Comedy. Baxter talks about turning to humor in dark times, the burden of expectations, and writing a protagonist, Brock Hobson, who some readers love and others detest. He discusses how seeing websites and ads that