Jennifer Solheim is the Associate Director of the BookEnds novel revision fellowship of Southampton Arts at StonyBrook University. Her short stories and essays have appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Pinch, and Poets & Writers. She is the author of The Performance of Listening in Postcolonial Francophone Literature (2018, Liverpool University Press), and holds a PhD in French from the University of Michigan and an MFA in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars.
“In Slimani’s novel, the burden placed upon women to care for children balances alongside the treatment and perceptions of immigrant women. And rendering these issues to subtext, rather than treating them head-on and politically, the narrative forces the reader to become complicit in the shoddy treatment of others for the sake of convenience and creature comforts.”
“Any idea was worth at least playing around with before making a final decision”: Landis Blair chats with Jenn Solheim about illustrating The Hunting Accident, a graphic novel by David L. Carlson, out now from First Second Books.
“The cartoons were drawn in that state of horror, panic, sleeplessness, despair”: Tom Toro chats with Jennifer Solheim about Trump, the intersection of comedy and politics, and Tiny Hands, his book of New Yorker cartoons, out now from Dock Street Press.
From the Archives: “Grace Paley shows us one way in which the heretofore old-fashioned, third-person omniscient perspective might be one of contemporary fiction writers’ greatest tools to elicit empathy for characters.”
“So how did Sansal pull this off?”: Jenn Solheim on dystopian narrative authority in Boualem Sansal’s 2084.
“The energy in the room was urgent, generous, palpable”: Jennifer Solheim on the first gathering of The Conversation: a Chicago literary series.
Jennifer Solheim talks with Sam Allingham about his debut collection, The Great American Song Book, as well as the role music played in shaping these stories, borrowed forms, and what it was like to release a book the week after the presidential election.
“Grace Paley shows us one way in which the heretofore old-fashioned, third-person omniscient perspective might be one of contemporary fiction writers’ greatest tools to elicit empathy for characters.”
Jennifer Solheim on Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation: “Through Harun, Daoud explores both the ethics of Camus creating a nameless Arab character to kill on the beach as part of a philosophical exploration, and the horror of a pied noir being canonized for killing an Arab.”
“I believe that if you’re looking closely at the world, it’s funny. Even the horrible things are funny in some way. And if you’re looking closely enough, everything’s also pretty sad. So I see it as my job not to shy away from either of those, and to let them coexist.”
