Well-Versed, FSG/MCD associate editor Jackson Howard talks with Thomas Grattan about his new book,
The Recent East, which follows a mother and two teens as they navigate a new life in East Germany.
From the episode:
Jackson Howard: You and I talked about this when I bought the book, but it’s important to me as a queer guy to publish different types of queer stories that aren’t the kind of traditional coming out story that we’ve been served so many times that is just full of pain and abuse and violence, and that’s like one individual fighting against a horrible world. I mean, that is true for a lot of people, in fiction and in real life, but I guess I had read enough masochistic coming out stories to not want that. Michael, who’s arguably the main character or one of the main characters of your book his coming out story is at once very universal, but it’s also very specific to his quirks and also the circumstances of his time and of his family and of where he is in the
Megan Pillow is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Kentucky. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in, among other places, Electric Literature, SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, The Believer, Brevity, and Gay Magazine. Megan has also had stories featured on the Wigleaf Top 50, an essay honored as
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