Measured sentences draw the reader into the emotional dome she inhabits. The book’s even tone avoids associative leaps and instead mirrors the quotidian effort to keep going, day after day.

At night, flesh. Her tits sliding into her armpits, her stomach pushing against the elastic of her panties. The elbow with the dry patch that’s cracking, the crick in her neck. All of her sinking, spilling, oozing into the mattress, sloppy and sweating with a pillow between her knees, an itch on her ribcage she can’t ignore. Her stomach growling, her heart thumping. Meat.

While visiting Bowdoin College, Tony and Meadow walk around the campus. We’re reading together beneath a tree. We’re too old to be in college, but we don’t look like professors either. Our presence is unsettling, a foreshadowing of the daytime murder of Fabian Petrulio, which takes place later in the episode.

We interviewed Holly M. Wendt, author of the novel Heading North, about their path to publication, hockey twitter, and of course Patrick Swayze movies.

Since it’s founding in 2004, Barrelhouse has ended every interview with the same question: what is your favorite Patrick Swayze movie? We’ve asked The Swayze Question, quite literally, to anybody who would talk to us, everyone from Emmylou Harris to Ian MacKaye to Malcolm Gladwell to the Hold Steady.

The Long Form resists reading as a period of sustained focus or unilateral attention, and instead insists on the irreplaceability of life.

Sheila Squillante’s essay collection, All Things Edible, Random, and Odd, forthcoming from Clash Books, is equal parts memoir, celebration of her late father and the love of food that he passed on to his daughter, and exploration of the way these things continue influence her family’s life. We sat down around the virtual dinner table to talk about the book, the difference between writing memoir and essays, poetry and painting, and uncoolness, the Eighties, and of course Patrick Swayze.

His central question: what does being Puerto Rican mean to me now, given that it has meant nothing through most of my life?

The crux of Brookins’ resistance: to find beauty in the fight, and to acknowledge that imagining is good, but having is better.

Realizing that you are driving, or perhaps living, toward an unattainable life fuels the collection’s philosophical musings. 

Elektrik is translation operating as good translation should: as a megaphone for writers who might otherwise remain unheard in the Western canon.

In My Big Little Break, we ask authors to talk about the first piece they ever had published, how it felt to finally break through, and what they’ve learned since then. This week we’re pleased to be speaking with one of the featured authors at our upcoming conference in Philadelphia on September 23, Sara Lippmann.

In My Big Little Break, we ask authors to talk about the first piece they ever had published, how it felt to finally break through, and what they’ve learned since then. This week we’re pleased to be speaking with one of the featured authors at our upcoming conference in Philadelphia on September 23, Athena Dixon.

Where is the balance between wallowing in the past and reverent remembrance? How do we keep the present alive without abandoning who we’ve become?

As writers, we’ve all been stuck. Whether it’s figuring out an ending to the 87,000 word novel you’ve been working on for two years, or what that sad alien spaceman story is really about, or just how the hell do I move this story about the old man sitting in his neighbor’s basement with a gun and a bottle of rum along, we have all been frustrated and not quite sure how to move ahead (yes and sorry, those are all literally things that the person typing this introduction is trying to figure out right now). Maybe we can apply a little design thinking to our work?

All these strategies prod both the reader and the narrator to consider what she isn’t prepared to express outright.

At our Washington, DC conference this past Spring, we loved Holly Wendt’s craft workshop session Getting Hands on with Metaphor so much that we asked her to run it back at our Philly conference on September 23, 2023. We sat down with Holly to talk a bit about this very cool and effective workshop, what writers can get out of it, and of course Patrick Swayze movies.

Again and again, de Kerangal invokes the imagined threat of the forbidden country.

These poems are saturated with images of Antigone, autonomy, and the diaphanous film that stands between us and death.

Does our trauma guide us towards the darkness, or could our trauma act as a sort of beacon, inviting the darkness in?