Aida Zilelian on discovering that her novel The Legacy of Lost Things was about longing: “You know when you dream something, and you’re like, ‘I had such a weird dream,’ and as you’re saying the words out loud, you realize what the dream was actually about. When I read through the final version, I realized it then.”
“There’s no emotional implication for the writer or reader, but an opportunity to talk about horrors”: Jacob Paul and Hayden Carrón discuss Adolfo García Ortrega’s The Birthday Buyer in the context of the Spanish Holocaust novel.
Chris Cander talks shop about her creative process and the story origins of her latest novel.
“These are your people, like it or not, Kaufman tell us; you might as well love them anyway.”
J.A. Bernstein says of Michael Pitre’s Fives and Twenty-Fives: “It would not be an exaggeration to say that this might be the best novel to come out of the current carnage in Iraq.”
Bich Minh Nguyen talks to Sarah Layden about her latest novel, Pioneer Girl, and moving from the Midwest to the West Coast: “For me, writing is always about looking back and looking forward in the same moment. It’s living within more than sphere, identity, and place, and trying to understand that—trying to find a few moments of stillness and clarity.”
“I think writers live in a state of constant contradiction”: Susan Tepper interviewed by Richard Fulco.
“West of Sunset is a welcome corrective for the Shakespeare-in-Love brand of writer idolatry, in which talent and will overcome all obstacles. Instead, this is the portrait of the artist as an old man, after the promise and the fame have been stripped away, and only the writing remains.”
Ellen Prentiss Campbell on Anne Tyler’s newest novel: “Some fault her for sentiment or repetition, some find her characters too similarly marked by eccentricities of behavior and occupation. But others, like myself, believe authentic sentiment gets a bad rap, and recognize her people. Behind the public curtains, whose family, what profession, isn’t a little odd?”
