Sarah Stone
  • Hungry Ghost Theater: A Novel
  • Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers The True Sources of the Nile The Longman Guide to Intermediate and Advanced Fiction Writing
  • About
  • Stories
  • Nonfiction
  • Consultations/Coaching/Classes
  • News & Interviews
  • Events
  • The Marvelous Paragraph Project
  • Contact

Sarah Stone

  • Hungry Ghost Theater: A Novel/
  • Books/
    • Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers
    • The True Sources of the Nile
    • The Longman Guide to Intermediate and Advanced Fiction Writing
  • About/
  • Stories/
  • Nonfiction/
  • Consultations/Coaching/Classes/
  • News & Interviews/
  • Events/
  • The Marvelous Paragraph Project/
  • Contact/

Sarah Stone

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Sarah Stone

  • Hungry Ghost Theater: A Novel/
  • Books/
    • Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers
    • The True Sources of the Nile
    • The Longman Guide to Intermediate and Advanced Fiction Writing
  • About/
  • Stories/
  • Nonfiction/
  • Consultations/Coaching/Classes/
  • News & Interviews/
  • Events/
  • The Marvelous Paragraph Project/
  • Contact/

 

  • Hungry Ghost Theater: A Novel/
  • Books/
    • Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers
    • The True Sources of the Nile
    • The Longman Guide to Intermediate and Advanced Fiction Writing
  • About/
  • Stories/
  • Nonfiction/
  • Consultations/Coaching/Classes/
  • News & Interviews/
  • Events/
  • The Marvelous Paragraph Project/
  • Contact/

Sarah Stone

The Marvelous Paragraph Project

Never miss another installment of the Marvelous Paragraph Project. Sign up here to receive the newest piece on the day it’s published (usually once or twice a month).

(I respect your privacy. I wish this went without saying, but here goes: your info is yours, I will never sell or rent it out, and you can unsubscribe at any time).

Thank you for signing up—it’s great to have you as part of this community. Happy reading!

Guest MPP Posts

Beth Alvarado on Karen Brennan's Monsters: On Listening to Voices

Charles Baxter on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Karamazov Brothers: Not Understanding

Lucy Jane Bledsoe on Louise Erdrich and Miriam Toews: How to take risks

James Cagney on Gary Soto's "A Red Palm"

Harriet S. Chessman on Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript”: Humility and the Present Tense

R. Cathey Daniels on Lynda Barry’s Cruddy: Set Pieces

Marcy Dermansky on Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here

Caroline Goodwin on Amber Flora Thomas, Red Channel in the Rupture

David Haynes on Right by My Side

Lillian Howan on Wakako Yamauchi

Yang Huang on George Eliot’s Middlemarch: Owning up

Judy Juanita on Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

Annie Kim on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre: The Possibility of a Walk

Caroline Kim on Mariko Nagai’s Georgic: Stories

Devi S. Laskar on Natalie Diaz's When My Brother Was an Aztec

Margot Livesey on Andrea Barrett's Archangel

[Name of author] on Carole Maso’s Ava: An Uncommon Refrain

Ron Nyren on Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor

Pamela Painter on Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”: The Dream as Literary Confession and Revelation

Angela Pneuman on Samantha Harvey's Dear Thief

Anne Raeff on Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Joan Silber on Grace Paley's "Mother" and "A Conversation with My Father"

Marisa Silver on Leonard Michaels’s “Murderers”

Debra Spark on William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow

Vendela Vida on Christopher Bollen’s A Beautiful Crime

Maw Shein Win on Jennifer Hasegawa's La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living

Sarah’s MPP Posts

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah, and Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City

Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow

Gina Berriault, “Around the Dear Ruin,” and Joy Williams, “Honored Guest” (Or, no, women characters do not have to be “likable.” Why are we still having this discussion?)

Venita Blackburn, Dead in Long Beach, California, Alta’s California Book Club's July book

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, and Jenny Offill, Weather: Imagining the Future

A.S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories (plus Marriage to the Sea has a cover!)

Michael Cunningham, Specimen Days: Tenderness

Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other: Breaking Forms

Elena Ferrante, Days of Abandonment and The Lost Daughter: Hypnotic Intensity

Jessica Hagedorn, The Gangster of Love, and Alta’s California Book Club

Mohsin Hamid, Exit West: A Novel

Dara Horn, Eternal Life, and Kevin McIlvoy, Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels

Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun

Tove Jansson, Fair Play and The Summer Book

Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

Raven Leilani, Luster, and Aoko Matsuda, Where the Wild Ladies Are

Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House, and Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being: Explosion and Flight (An Introduction to the Marvelous Paragraph Project)

Sabrina Orah Mark, Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales

Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, and Dara Horn, A Guide for the Perplexed: Foreshadowing Emergency

Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You, and Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread: Life after Disaster

Sigrid Nunez, The Friend, and Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World: The Slowly Emerging Story

Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police

Mary Oliver, “Every Morning,” and Edward P. Jones, “Old Boys, Old Girls”: “You don’t know anything unless you do”

Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox, and Angela Carter, “The Bloody Chamber”: Muse and Bride

Helen Oyeyemi, Peaces, and Ali Smith, Hotel World: Unleashed Observation

Drawing the Line: Rael San Fratello at the U.S.-Mexico Border and Gabrielle Brant Freeman, Girltrap: Disrupting the Game

Mary M. Slechta, Mulberry Street Stories

Ali Smith, Autumn

Zadie Smith, Grand Union, and E.M. Forster, Howard's End: People Watching

Zadie Smith, On Beauty, and Jeanette Winterson, The Passion: Domesticity and Wildness

Zadie Smith, The Fraud

Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: Artful Wildness

Kikuko Tsumura, There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job (Polly Barton, trans.)

 

© Sarah Stone 2014-2025.  All rights reserved. Installations (details) by Hannah Stone, photographed by Ron Nyren.