By Kathy Crowley



A few evenings ago, I finished reading Anne Enright’s Booker Prize winning novel, The Gathering – a brutal, beautiful story built around a suicide, a wake, a large Irish family and a narrator who is angry and honest to the point of discomfort. It left me breathless — not in a euphoric way, but instead in that sense of needing to breathe and not, somehow, being able to do so. Although I am happy to report my breathing resumed, I still found myself inarticulate about… Continue

By Kathy Crowley



“When faced with the opportunity to read a book by someone who isn’t by profession a writer, I always go for the doctor.” —Stephen J Dubner



(And can I just say here, Mr. Dubner, doctor-writers everywhere – and their publishers — thank you.)



I write fiction, most of the time, because that’s what I like to write, but also because writing about my work raises all kinds of complications. Every once in a while, though, I am so moved by my experience… Continue

By Kathy Crowley



The idea of writing a novel with many narrators began growing in my mind years ago. I blame it on Faulkner, specifically on The Sound and The Fury, which I read at an impressionable age. "Caddie smelled like trees." Yes, that may have been the line that suckered me in. The beauty, the puzzle-like complexity of fitting the various stories and voices together. And it didn't look that hard. How about this ENTIRE CHAPTER from As I Lay Dying: "My mother is a fish"? I… Continue