“Zambreno’s explicit referencing of not just film tropes in general, but Noh theater and French cinema and American plays in particular, immediately raises questions about agency, artifice, and images of women. And in the reflective process that follows, a reader might naturally find themselves asking: who is the director of our lives?”
Lara Zielin calls Sara Farizan’s new novel Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel “more than just a successful young-adult novel. It’s an intersection where a work of art meets a cultural shift at exactly the right moment.”
“So one of my goals was to explore the seemingly perverse pleasure to be had from constraints, or form”: Peter Turchi discusses his new book, A Muse and a Maze with long-time friend Robert Boswell.
Eleanor J. Bader calls Lynn Kanter’s third novel, Her Own Vietnam, “a cogent rebuttal to politicians who wax poetic about the glory and honor of war and militarism.”
Shelly Oria on journeying with her characters: “I follow the voice; I usually have no idea where the fuck we’re going. I’m a hitchhiker and often the driver is kind of an asshole. Or not really an asshole, just very preoccupied with someone or something that isn’t me.”
In Part II of Philip Graham’s interview with John Warner, Warner talks about living a literary life online: “I seem to be congenitally incapable of making plans. This is often to my benefit. . . but it also has meant an extremely ad hoc career.”
John Warner talks to Philip Graham about giving his characters an extra graceful breath: “I see mankind basically as a pestilence, bent on destroying each other and the Earth itself. . . And yet, sometimes we can break free of our monstrousness and be genuinely good and kind.”
“Each story is a kind of on-the-job training”: Bret Anthony Johnston talks with Sarah Anne Johnson about his debut novel, Remember Me Like This.
“. . .these two groups of women are indeed sisters under the skin, and these authors are sisters as well.” Ellen Prentiss Campbell on connecting Nesbit and Otsuka through their use of first-person plural.
“I would be doing a great disservice to my fiction, to my readers, and to myself if I ever wrote about any other place”: David Armand talks with Dixon Hearne about landscape, Southern Louisiana, and his forthcoming novel, The Gorge.
