“She kept coming back, speaking to me in the night, adding to and deepening her story, so in a way the realization that I needed to write a novel about her was very natural: she led me there.” Maxim Loskutoff talks with Steven Wingate about his novel Ruthie Fear, the gravity of Montana, and the freedom of the natural world.
“When it comes to the Holocaust and the Apollo program, we have an added sense that they both seem impossible. These two events represent the worst of what we are capable of doing to each other, and also the best of what we are capable of doing together.” Hannah Redder talks with Patrick Hicks about Nazi concentration camps, America’s space program, and his second Holocaust novel, In the Shadow of Dora.
“I saw a parallel in the way the body attacks itself in an autoimmune disease to the way guilt attacks the mind. The bodies of many of these characters define, in some ways, the boundaries of their lives.” Alexander Tilney talks with the most recent Prairie Schooner Book Prize winner, Megan Cummins, about her short story collection If the Body Allows It.
Linda Kass talks with Eleanor J. Bader about her new book, A Ritchie Boy, the ways fact and fiction merge in the story, and the importance of remembering both our personal and political histories.
“In ways large and small, the task of a novelist who writes about the past is to make it come to life, to find singular details that make the story breathe”: Christina Baker Kline talks with Jennifer Solheim about her new novel, The Exiles.
“Readers are always on the side of romance; if two remotely promising people meet, we fan the flames. I wanted to use those expectations and to subvert them.” Mari Coates talks with her mentor Margot Livesey on the occasion of publishing of The Boy in the Field, Livesey’s ninth novel.
“As I get older, I’m less attached to this idea of home as a single space, and I try to envision home as something more expansive, more queer”: Carter Sickels talks with Megan Kruse about his new novel, The Prettiest Star,” building community, writing from a place of empathy, and more.
“I have absorbed a lot of influence from writers who are working outside of realism, and I do think that’s probably kind of nudged me in the direction of the strange.” Yohanca Delgado talks with Laura van den Berg about her new short story collection, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears.
“A story just comes out a certain way and then you either follow it or you don’t.” Maryse Meijer answers Jenn Solheim’s questions on her debut novel, The Seventh Mansion, out now from FSG.
“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.
