Knowledge is Irreversible: An Interview with Vanessa Blakeslee
by Barrett Bowlin
“Maybe all the books I read in childhood about faraway places helped to shape that part of my imaginative engine; I don’t know.”
“Maybe all the books I read in childhood about faraway places helped to shape that part of my imaginative engine; I don’t know.”
R. Mac Jones chats with Julia Elliott about her new novel, The New and Improved Romie Futch, heshers, and baboons.
“But—let’s face it—literary fiction has become a genre of its own”: Benjamin Percy chats with Brandon Dudley about his latest novel, genre fiction, fatherhood, and more.
Chance Solem-Pfeifer talks to Justin Taylor about living in the Pacific Northwest, writing in the second-person, seeing Phish live, and playing pinball.
“Willie—like all of the characters in A Long Long Way, in fact—is a character constructed primarily through simile”: Patty Keefe Durso on figurative language and characterization in Sebastian Barry’s novel.
On the personal origins of her novel, Thicker Than Blood: “[It] started with the idea of that letter and why someone would keep a letter that no one would be allowed to read.”
James Magruder sits down with Kathy Flann to talk about her new collection, Get a Grip, her path to fiction, the role humor plays in her work, writing in the second-person point of view, and more.
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.”
“It’s short, but once I hit on it, this little observation seemed to encapsulate everything I’d written before or since: ‘In my writing, I wrestle with questions of gender, power, identity, complicity, and harm. Even so, I still find the world beautiful.'”
Lenore Myka on Mavis Gallant’s story “Mlle. Dias de Corta,” which she calls “a high watermark for what it means to write a truly compelling, frequently unlikeable, and ultimately empathetic character.”
