MFA reading list

For my MFA class this semester—a literature course called “Fictional Forms”—I’m asking students to choose one debut story collection and one contemporary novel from the following lists:

STORY COLLECTIONS

Alan Heathcock, Volt

Amber Sparks, May We Shed These Human Bodies

Chad Simpson, Tell Everyone I Said Hi

Claire Vaye Watkins, Battleborn

Ethan Rutherford, The Peripatetic Coffin

Eugene Cross, Fires of Our Choosing

Jamie Quatro, I Want to Show You More

Michael Nye, Strategies Against Extinction

Nina McConigley, Cowboys and East Indians

Roxane Gay, Ayiti

NOVELS 

Bryan Furuness, The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson

Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

Kelly Braffet, Save Yourself

Lauren Groff, Arcadia

Myfanwy Collins, Echolocation

Owen King, Double Feature

Pamela Erens, The Virgins

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

Snowden Wright, Play Pretty Blues

In addition, everyone in the class will read Matthew Quick’s The Good Luck of Right Now (Feb. 2014 release), more than a dozen craft essays (some of which are actually audio lectures or panel discussions), and more than two dozen short stories by the likes of Matt Bell, Sarah Layden, Cary Holladay, Jared Yates Sexton, Robert Boswell, Antonya Nelson, Patricia Henley, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, some guy named Chekhov, and a whole lot more.

So, yes, I am excited about this semester.