Intensely moving but never sentimental, Academy Street is a profound meditation on what Faulkner called 'the human heart in conflict with itself'. In Tess Lohan, Mary Costello has created one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary fiction. What a marvel of a book.

I think that's what I love about writing, is the ability to try to, in a sense, take a vacation from yourself and try to enter the sensibility of another time, another character, another place.

I live in Cullowhee, North Carolina. That's where I teach, at Western Carolina University. That region is where my family has lived for a long time and that region is my landscape.

Faulkner came from my region and taught me how you could write about a place.

It’s ever been the way of the man of science or philosophy. Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can’t see nothing.” – Snipes (185)

As I get older I find myself thinking it all begins with Shakespeare.

The woman doesn't look up. It's as if she's deaf. Maybe she is. Maybe she's like the Cambodian women I've read about, the ones who witnessed so many atrocities that they have willed themselves blind. Maybe that's what you have to do sometimes to survive. You kill off part of yourself, your hearing or eyesight, your capacity for hope.