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Smash All the Windows

Interview with Alex Espinoza: Author of The Five Acts of Diego León

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Alex Espinoza was born in Tijuana, Mexico and raised in suburban Los Angeles. His first novel, Still Water Saints, was published by Random House in 2007 and was named a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection. His second novel, The Five Acts of Diego León, was also published by Random House in March 2013.

Alex’s fiction has appeared in Inlandia: A Literary Journey Through California’s Inland Empire, The Southern California Review, Flaunt, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. His essays have been published at Salon.com, in the New York Times Magazine, in The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, and as part of the historic Chicano Chapbook Series. His awards include a 2009 Margaret Bridgeman Fellowship in Fiction to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a 2014 Fellowship in Prose from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2014 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for The Five Acts of Diego León, and a 2019 Fellowship from MacDowell.

His newest book is Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime, which was published by The Unnamed Press in June, 2019. Alex is the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at UC Riverside.

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Interview with Jane Davis: Author of At the Stroke of Nine O’Clock

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Hailed by “The Bookseller” as ‘One to Watch’, Jane Davis is the author of nine thought-provoking novels. Her debut, Half-truths & White Lies, won the Daily Mail First Novel Award 2008. Of her subsequent three novels, “Compulsion Reads” wrote, ‘Davis is a phenomenal writer, whose ability to create well-rounded characters that are easy to relate to feels effortless’. Her 2015 novel, An Unknown Woman, was “Writing Magazine”’s Self-published Book of the Year 2016 and has been shortlisted for two further awards. Smash all the Windows was the inaugural winner of the Selfies (best independently-published work of fiction) award 2019. When she isn’t writing, you may spot her disappearing up a mountain with a camera in hand. Her favorite description of fiction is ‘made-up truth’.

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Interview with Jane Davis: Author of Smash All the Windows

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I first interviewed UK-based independent author Jane Davis in 2016 about her thoughts on writing and literary fiction (the link to that interview is at the end of this post.) Jane’s latest novel, Smash All the Windows, was published in April 2018 and is currently available for purchase. 

Can you describe the type of writing that characterizes your output?
Henry James wrote in an 1884 magazine article that a novel is ‘a direct impression of life’. My own favourite definition of fiction is ‘made-up truth’, which is pretty close. Whatever my subject-matter, I try to make sure that the end-product is honest, credible and authentic. I like to write about big subjects and give my characters almost impossible moral dilemmas. I don’t allow my characters a shred of privacy. I know what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, the lies they tell, their secret fears. But I only meet them at a particular point on their journeys, usually in a highly volatile or unstable situation, and then I throw them to the lions. How people behave under pressure reveals so much about them. [Read more…] about Interview with Jane Davis: Author of Smash All the Windows

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