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It takes a rare talent to make a story about difficult parents and troubled children stand out against all the stories that use the Tolstoyan model of all unhappy families being alike. But I am happy to report that Matthew Lansburgh has that talent in abundance. His collection of linked short stories, Outside Is the Ocean, revolves around one of fiction’s great bad mothers, Heike, a German-American who survived the Second World War only to inflict what seems, at times, to be nearly equivalent terrors on her son and adopted daughter. Self-centered, vain, erratic, and yet passionately convinced of her own righteousness, Heike is the permanent center of her own terrible party, the victim of so many monstrous everyday injustices that she’d be beatified if only anyone knew, or cared. - Paul La Farge
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About the Matthew Lansburgh’s fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, StoryQuarterly, Guernica, Ecotone, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Joyland, and has won awards from Columbia Journal and The Florida Review. He earned an MFA in Fiction from NYU, where he received a Veterans Writing Workshop Fellowship, and he lives in New York with his partner.
About the Guest Paul La Farge is the author of four The Night Ocean (The Penguin Press, 2017); The Artist of the Missing (FSG, 1999), Haussmann, or the Distinction(FSG, 2001), and Luminous Airplanes (FSG, 2011); and a book of imaginary dreams, The Facts of Winter(McSweeney’s Books, 2005). He is the grateful recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library in 2013–14. He lives in a subterranean ‘annex’ in upstate New York, where he is almost certainly up to no good.
About the Electric Literature is an independent publisher amplifying the power of storytelling through digital innovation. Electric Literature’s weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, invites established authors, indie presses, and literary magazines to recommended great fiction. Once a month we feature our own recommendation of original, previously unpublished fiction. Recommended Reading is supported by the Amazon Literary Partnership, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. For other links from Electric Literature, follow us, or sign up for our eNewsletter.
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About the Matthew Lansburgh’s fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, StoryQuarterly, Guernica, Ecotone, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Joyland, and has won awards from Columbia Journal and The Florida Review. He earned an MFA in Fiction from NYU, where he received a Veterans Writing Workshop Fellowship, and he lives in New York with his partner.
About the Guest Paul La Farge is the author of four The Night Ocean (The Penguin Press, 2017); The Artist of the Missing (FSG, 1999), Haussmann, or the Distinction(FSG, 2001), and Luminous Airplanes (FSG, 2011); and a book of imaginary dreams, The Facts of Winter(McSweeney’s Books, 2005). He is the grateful recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library in 2013–14. He lives in a subterranean ‘annex’ in upstate New York, where he is almost certainly up to no good.
About the Electric Literature is an independent publisher amplifying the power of storytelling through digital innovation. Electric Literature’s weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, invites established authors, indie presses, and literary magazines to recommended great fiction. Once a month we feature our own recommendation of original, previously unpublished fiction. Recommended Reading is supported by the Amazon Literary Partnership, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. For other links from Electric Literature, follow us, or sign up for our eNewsletter.
Kindle Edition
Published October 15, 2017
5 people want to read
About the author
Matthew Lansburgh
3 books19 followersMatthew Lansburgh's collection of linked stories, OUTSIDE IS THE OCEAN, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction. Matthew's fiction has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, New England Review, Glimmer Train, Ecotone, Alaska Quarterly Review, Epoch, StoryQuarterly, Guernica, and Michigan Quarterly Review, and has been shortlisted twice in the Best American Short Stories series. He has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, MacDowell and Yaddo. Visit him online at www.matthewlansburgh.com
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