In Part II of Shawn Andrew Mitchell’s interview with Charles Yu, the two writers continue their conversation by discussing the management of time in and out of fiction, Realism, and human-to-robot consciousness transfer.
Shawn Andrew Mitchell beams in from the future of a quiet Sunday morning in South Korea to chat with Charles Yu on a quiet Saturday evening in Los Angeles. In Part I of their conversation the two writers discuss the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, consensual grammar, favorite gadgets, and more.
It’s all about choices in Kevin Moffett’s new collection—Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events—bizarre, unsettling, gut-wrenching choices.
Fresh from a relationship with a feminist scholar, I was on guard against Shann Ray’s American Masculine before I even cracked its spine. With a title like that, I thought, you’d better have a gay man in Chelsea, a drag queen in Flint, a straight man watching a hired man wash his yacht, a man [...]
Friends say they saw our bromance bloom.
I took them aside and said, admiringly, “that Nick Ostdick is alright.”
Nick took them aside and said, wistfully, “Shawn seems like a cool dude.”
There was a beer here, a beer there, always with chaperones. Then mano-a-mano happy hours that spilled into dinners that spilled into the manliest of frozen [...]
The title of Jim Shepard’s latest collection, You Think That’s Bad, could also be a creative mantra. Here the veteran writer discusses his research process, the apocalyptic state of the world, the (possible) irrelevancy of literature to the apocalypse, his epic mustache—and other matters of importance.
This week’s feature is Miracle Boy and Other Stories, by Pinckney Benedict. Published this year by Press 53, the collection features a misfit cast of characters from the mountains of West Virginia. Known by names like “Lizard” and “mudman,” their very out-thereness commands the respect of reader. These backwoods folk may be wildly different from [...]
Shawn Mitchell gets under the hood of Pinckney Benedict’s Miracle Boy and Other Stories to see how the author manages to pack an apocalypse into each story. In his newest book, Benedict revisits his Appalachian heritage and peoples it with mythological bulls, dogs, mudmen, and robots.
Shawn Mitchell talks to Elif Batuman and Geoff Dyer (and they talk to each other) about obsession and addiction, the permeable line between labeling work fiction or nonfiction, Stendahl syndrome, and future projects.
