Off for the Summer
by The Editors
We’re off until Labor Day. Thank you for your readership.
I no longer think it's possible to try to write a timely novel.
I would probably quit writing if it didn’t function as a spiritual practice for...
“I think one of the feelings exile produces is a sense of in-between—you’re both within a place and somehow distinctly outside its borders.” Natalie Bakopoulos talks with Jennifer Solheim about her new novel, Scorpionfish, out next week from Tin House Books.
“That’s how Chapter 11 became Chapter 1.” Barrett Bowlin and David James Poissant talk short stories vs. novels, comic books, the pandemic, and Poissant’s new novel, Lake Life, out next week from Simon & Schuster.
“I wanted to understand why we do the same bad things over and over.” Ellen Prentiss Campbell interviews Ginger Eager about her debut novel, The Nature of Remains, out now from New Issues.
“I want to help advance the kind of crip lit in which people with disabilities are living their lives and doing perfectly fine, to highlight and differentiate the times when disability does and does not matter.” Elizabeth Earley talks with Teresa Milbrodt about her new collection, Instances of Head Switching.
“I wanted to be in dialogue with the literary tradition of ‘young artist comes of age in the city,'” Kyle McCarthy tells Brad Wetherell. “I wanted to write a version of that, a bent and twisted version.” Everyone Knows How Much I Love You is out next week from Ballantine Books.
“The novel is narrated as an episodic composite, linked by the author’s narrative conceit: a persistent Argentinian journalist has been seeking to interview elusive, reclusive Watanabe.” Ellen Prentiss Cambell reviews Fracture, by Andrés Neuman.
“I count on memory to work as a kind of filter, and I trust that what sticks in the filter, even if I don’t know why it’s there, is there for a reason.” Michael Welch talks with Larry Watson about his new novel and a career of writing the High Plains.
“Reading this novel in the time of COVID, as workers suffer, in massive proportions, through financial and psychological implications of job loss, is like sucking air through a cavity.” Josie Tolin on Hilary Leichter’s debut, Temporary.
“I’m playing with the question of fate but also social mobility. How much do we become the people our family situation predicted we would?” Debra Jo Immergut talks with Sharon Harrigan about her debut novel, Half, writing in first-person plural, darkness in fiction, desire, and more.
Surprising Things Can Happen: An Interview with Kristen Roupenian
Part of a Bigger Conversation: An Interview with Rebecca Makkai
If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi: An Interview with Neel Patel
Sometimes Taking Things Out Counts as Writing: an Interview with Celeste Ng
Influences: An Interview with Tobias Wolff
Stories We Love: “Blue Lenses,” by Daphne Du Maurier
Stories We Love: “White Angel,” by Michael Cunningham
Stories We Love: Donald Barthelme’s “The School,” In Which is Revealed the Meaning of Life
Stories We Love: "A Small, Good Thing" by Raymond Carver
Stories We Love: "The Fall River Axe Murders," by Angela Carter
