“To love and to express it is to be vulnerable. To create works of art is to be vulnerable, and it’s hard for people to let themselves be vulnerable. Especially in this world, where the internet lets us democratically savage one another, it’s even scarier, but the courage to be an artist means also the courage to love and to express it.” So says Robert Olen Butler in this candid interview with Emily Alford.
Viva Cuba! Myth, magic, ghostly remains: Ana Menendez’s latest story collection, Adios, Happy Homeland! shadows people on the run from their circumstances and themselves. The journalist and Pushcart Prize-winning author talks communal bonds, fictional bibliographies, the elusiveness of identity, and much more.
In her seventh novel, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Margot Livesey updates Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre so smoothly and skillfully that you’d barely even notice.
At age 53, Joan Leegant published her first book, the critically heralded story collection, An Hour in Paradise. With her debut novel, Wherever You Go, she has continued to prove her presence as a preeminent Jewish-American writer. Jody Lisberger taught fiction at Harvard with Joan Leegant, and their interview explores questions of structure, identity, listening to your characters and the treatment of ethical issues in fiction.
In her eighth book—and fourth novel—Leah Hager Cohen explores the dynamics of grief and mourning with her trademark curious mind and loving attention to detail. Steven Wingate and the author discuss “otherness,” withholding judgment on characters, and the importance of ritual.
Character likability. “Plot-driven” as pejorative. Research limits in historical fiction. The mail-order-bride as escape route. The double-edged sword of social media. Anna Solomon tells it straight in this conversation with Sara Schaff.
In conversation with Julie Judkins, author Scott Nadelson discusses how the “mad mystic hammering” of Bob Dylan inspired him to become a writer, why being a formerly reluctant reader informs his teaching, and how New Jersey has evolved in his fiction from an actual place to a state of being.
An invented language, off-stage heroes, searing political comedy. Katarina Matsson sits down with award-winning Swedish playwright and novelist Jonas Hassen Khemiri to discuss translation, the power-struggle of words, rats, germs, leaving home to write about it, and why hearing voices doesn’t necessarily mean you’re crazy.
Jonathan Lethem discusses our unwillingness to let go of the Tinkerbell-myth of benevolent power, MFA programs, the idea of New York City as a Ponzi scheme, why in some ways subcultures are all that exist, and his past and future work in this wide-ranging interview with Roohi Choudhry.
“Thunderstruck,” Aaron Cance describes his reading of Bruce Machart’s two debut books: a novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, and a story collection, Men in the Making, out this week. They also discuss the themes of faith, masculinity, and love, and how a New England basement is a helpful metaphor for writing.
