Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of two novels: The Green Shore (Simon & Schuster, 2012) and Scorpionfish (Tin House Books, 2020). Her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Granta, Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, the New York Times, Ninth Letter, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the 2010 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. She is a former Fulbright Scholar (Greece), and has received fellowships from the Camargo Foundation, the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, and the MacDowell Colony. She’s an associate professor at Wayne State University.
From the Archives: In a Strange Room chronicles Damon’s travels as he journeys from Greece, to various countries in Africa, to India. Traveling, in general, disorients. We are displaced from our normal locations, we are observing places that are not our own, and our minds constantly compare the new, foreign place with the familiar one.
“Though Indelicacy does not announce itself as autofiction, it shares with autofiction what I find to be the most fundamental aspects of the genre: the act of writing becomes inextricable from the story being told.” Natalie Bakopoulos reviews Amina Cain’s debut novel.
“If friendship is the shared shore, sometimes you’re standing on solid ground, and sometimes you’re the one at sea:” Elizabeth Ames talks with Natalie Bakopoulos about her debut novel, The Other’s Gold.
From the Archives: “The narrator has spent most of her life in other people’s shadows, but through her storytelling asserts an identity that’s no longer tethered to another, one released only by disgrace.”
“Driscoll is the master of capturing a delicate humanity where most people might be least likely to look”: Natalie Bakopoulos on Jack Driscoll’s The Goat Fish and the Lover’s Knot, out this spring from Wayne State University Press.
“The narrator has spent most of her life in other people’s shadows, but through her storytelling asserts an identity that’s no longer tethered to another, one released only by disgrace.”
“I heard Marilynne Robinson say once that “we can never escape the landscape of our preoccupations.” I was struck by that phrase and I think of it all the time, the landscape of our preoccupations. I feel liberated by it.”
Douglas Trevor talks about his debut novel, Girls I Know, how the narrative voice of a silent character can expand in fiction, the way landscapes—human and natural—can rebound from death, and more.
In her latest novel, Zadie Smith challenges the very notion of what we talk about when we talk about realism.
Marriage is so last century. Natalie Bakopoulos contemplates the demise of the marriage plot and Jeffrey Eugenides’s complex, undermining revival of it in his aptly-titled novel, The Marriage Plot. Is love still the ultimate trump card? Dear reader, it is. With some qualifications.
