Take the format of a spy thriller, shape it around real-life incidents involving international terrorism, leaven it with dark, dry humor, toss in a love rectangle, give everybody a gun, and let everything play out in the outer reaches of upstate New York. Sounds like the summer satire you’ve been waiting for. Enter for aContinue reading

Today is National Iced Tea Day, of course. This being the South, we have plenty of cool, refreshing iced tea — make that, sweet tea — in our office. But on a sunny, sweltering day like today, iced tea is meant to be sipped and savored, gulped and guzzled from a tall glass with aContinue reading

We’ve matched up the first lines of our Fall 2014 fiction with the titles from which they come. This handy-dandy guide also serves as the answer key for the Fall’s First Lines quiz in our new Inside Algonquin newsletter. (Have you signed up for the Inside Algonquin newsletter? Oh, please do! It’s great fun.) 1.“I’mContinue reading

Pulitzer Prize winning author Richard Russo talks spies, perspective, setting, and striking a balance with Brock Clarke, author of the upcoming novel The Happiest People in the World. “The parallel universe Clarke creates … is both our world and not, and like his baffled, yearning characters, we navigate it with surprise and wonder,” Russo saysContinue reading

As we head into the unofficial end of summer with Labor Day weekend, we wondered about which books captured our authors’ attention during the dog days. “My favorite book of the summer was James Salter’s All That Is.  Incredibly, Salter published this recent novel when he was 88 years old, and yet his writing isContinue reading

Here are excerpts from the Algonquin Reader essays by Lin Enger, Bill Roorbach and Brock Clarke: The High Divide by Lin Enger:  “In 1883 my great-grandfather, a Norwegian immigrant, arrived in Dakota Territory to homestead 160 acres of rolling prairie. A year later, according to family legend, the last wild buffalo east of the JamesContinue reading