by LAWRENCE NEIL
Wiley Webb is a freshman progressive house DJ from Malibu who was born with a stage name. His common app essay began “At my first rave” and his two latest singles, ‘Humour’ and ‘Ambrosia’, dropped in April.
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by KATHARINE SCHWAB
Richard Powers fits right in at Stanford. One of the first people to have his genome decoded, he has worked as a computer programmer and planned to major in physics while studying at Urbana-Champaign. But most importantly, he’s a prolific novelist and National Book Award winner with his eleventh volume on the way. His work fuses his fascination with science, stemming from what Tobias Wolff called an “extraordinary wide-ranging curiosity,” with the humanity he ultimately finds within his characters and his readers.
On February 13th, Richard Powers read a brand new short story to an intimate crowd at Cemex Auditorium. As the Stein Visiting Writer this quarter, Powers is teaching a creative writing workshop entitled Form and Feeling. He and his students are exploring how to produce the maximal emotional affect on their audience. The story he read, Saints Hill (he was very clear that there’s no apostrophe), is his own final project and answer to this question. “The paint is very, very wet,” he laughed to the crowd in Cemex. He had finished Saints Hill that afternoon, inspired by an unnamed painting by artist Olaf Krans. The story, half realist and half allegorical, details a couple’s journey to a small prairie town, which is described as “the last breath-catch before facing down the bloody future.”
by ARMINE PILIKIAN
Anthony Marra is a novelist in his final year as Stegner Fellow. He was recently awarded the 2012 Whiting Writers’ Award, an award presented to talented emerging writers. His debut novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, set to publish this May, dives deep into the lives of two young doctors searching for peace and redemption during wartime in modern-day Chechnya. His short story “Chechnya,” an excerpt from the novel, won a 2010 Pushcart Prize and the 2010 Narrative Prize. We spoke with Marra via Skype.
by RAYMOND JEONG
Anthony Schepperd is an independent animator working in Philadelphia, whose work includes the visually mind-blowing music video, “The Music Scene.” He kindly spares his time for the Stanford Arts Review.
SAR:In the world of your music video “The Music Scene,” animals and television reign. Where did that concept come from?
by T. DOYLE
More than a decade ago, Chris Baty dared to dream that he and his friends could write a novel in one month. Today, he’s inspired thousands to do the same. He kindly sat down with the Stanford Arts Review.
by T. DOYLE
You may not know The New Yorker’s fiction editor by name—and she’s fine with that.
The New Yorker has no masthead. Its website contains biographies of 859 contributing writers, but a list of editorial staff is conspicuously absent. The magazine seems to treasure this secrecy, even if others don’t. Deborah Treisman, who has been editing fiction for The New Yorker for fifteen years, admits that the Internet age has made anonymity more difficult: the magazine’s fiction podcast brings her voice to the web once a month, and, according to the soft-spoken editor, has earned her “the one form of celebrity I have.”
