Faculty member Debra Spark‘s latest novel, Unknown Caller, is out now from LSU Press. Following is an excerpt from the first chapter (click through for full excerpt):

MAINE NIGHT

IT IS TWO IN THE MORNING when the phone rings. “Damn,” Joel says. “Sweetheart,” Daniella groans, meaning nothing particularly tender, just saying the word to put the world on pause while she figures out what’s required of her.

“I’ll get it,” she adds, though there’s really no point. The call isn’t for her.

In normal families, a late-night call means only one thing: tragedy. A drunken mishap. A car crash. A heart finally giving out. Maybe a decapitation or a roadside bomb, the twenty-first-century offering, as it does, an escalating range of horrors.

But the Pearlmans are not a normal family. When the phone rings at 2:00 a.m. at their house, it is always her calling. From Geneva or Paris or London. They can never be sure where she’s taken up residence, only that the call will be long-distance and unpleasant.

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Faculty member Charlie Baxter posed five questions to faculty member Dean Bakopoulos about his latest novel, Summerlong, in an interview featured at Fiction Writers Review:

Charles Baxter: The novel is set during a period of heat and sleeplessness. Did you think of the seasonal conditions as a realistic background to your story, or as metaphoric and emblematic, pointing us toward the restlessness of early middle age (for example)?

Dean Bakopoulos: Well, here in the Midwest, as you know, the various extremes of the weather–deep winter and high summer–can sometimes feel oppressive, particularly if you’re already in a low mood. I’m interested in the way climate change is increasing our already anxious, unsettled culture. But more specifically, I think extreme weather amplifies the pressures at hand in this novel, and occasionally alleviates them by giving people a kind of permission to get into trouble, and I think that’s rather realistic. If you’re already feeling claustrophobic, restless, aroused, or filling up with self-pity, a heat wave or a hard freeze is going to feel like one more thing that’s gone out of control for you. Break up novels (or break up albums in music) are about the loss of control. Bon Iver’s beautiful  “For Emma, Forever Ago,” for instance, seems like it could only have been produced during a great Wisconsin winter; Dylan’s song “If You See Her, Say Hello,” from “Blood on the Tracks,” which destroys me every time I hear it, feels very much like a summer song, from the moment the city of Tangier is evoked.

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A story by faculty member Lauren Groff appears at The New Yorker:

It was an old hunting camp shipwrecked in twenty miles of scrub. Our friend had seen a Florida panther sliding through the trees there a few days earlier. But things had been fraying in our hands, and the camp was free and silent, so I walked through the resistance of my cautious husband and my small boys, who had wanted hermit crabs and kites and wakeboards and sand for spring break. Instead, they got ancient sinkholes filled with ferns, potential death by cat.

Continue reading the story online, and you can also find Lauren’s discussion of the story here: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/this-week-in-fiction-lauren-groff-on-the-cult-of-motherhood.

A poem by faculty member C. Dale Young appears at storySouth:

His other doctors proclaimed he would die
              within a month. He kept on living for years:
the simple fact is that he was barely thirty

              but had been dying for almost two of them.
The urge for prophecy is deep and deeply
              rooted inside the gnarled and human heart—

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Five short stories by faculty member Karen Brennan appear at Four Way Review:

STILL LIFE

A man told me there was nothing he would rather keep noticing—and he pointed to the spaces between palm fronds, chinks of turquoise and a few clouds. Just now, into this recollection, wanders an egg on a green dish.

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