The Literary Review’s Fiction Editor Justin Taylor on “Craft Talk Nobody Asked For” at BOMB Magazine

One of TLR Fiction Editor Justin Taylor’s favorite books is Sam Lipsyte’s The Fun Parts (FSG, 2013). Taylor often assigns stories from the collection in workshops, and he recently assigned the book to his low-residency Western New England University MFA students.

In a close reading for BOMB Magazine, Taylor writes:

The lesson—one lesson—to take from this radical economy is that endings rarely come from the outside, in the form of additions to or augmentations of a given story’s parameters, plot, or cast. More typically, an ending results from rigorous, even pathological recursion; the reinvention and recombination of those original searing elements that got you started writing the story in the first place.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Intrigued? Read more of “Craft Talk Nobody Asked For” at BOMB Magazine.