“I perceive fictionalized history as a terrific device for not only the artist’s explored interest in perhaps a previously unfamiliar subject, but as an opportunity to dust convention”: David Ebershoff talks with Brian Bartels in a 2010 interview From the Archives.
“Yet the author’s honesty leaves everything on the table through every page turned”: Brian Bartels on Matt Sumell’s new collection, Making Nice.
Adam Rapp—novelist, playwright, musician, and director—on creating scenic tension: “Asking questions about exits and entrances and trying to keep people in rooms is the ultimate goal.”
Confrontation becomes a powerful vessel in this narrator’s journey, and subsequently, the reader as passenger.
Hey, Park Rangers. Echoing the bold everlasting words of narration in Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love, “What a Midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on his sleeve, in plain sight,” I wanted to share some stories I loved from last year. There’s quite a bit of corny, unapologetic and Hallmark-y content in mid-February, and it can make any toiled romance feel heightened for unnecessary reasons. I know you’re smart enough to not place all your chips in the same stack. Of course I’m getting at sleeping around. It can’t be just […]
When Brian Bartels wasn’t writing or managing Fedora, the Greenwich Village bar and eatery that he co-owns with Gabriel Stulman, he spent 2012 trying to avoid the narcotic glow of his cell phone so he could spend more time reading. Here are the books that caught his attention last year.
Brian Bartels talks with David Ebershoff–author, editor-at-large for Random house, and Columbia professor–about such topics as the role research plays in his writing, writing the book you want to read, the advice his gives his students about drafting, and how he approaches revision.
Brian Bartels sits down with Adam Rapp–prolific playwright, musician, director, and novelist–to talk about his latest book, Punkzilla, and the mysterious process by which the words we create are shaped by music. Click here to read the whole interview-essay, “Shadow Sounds: Music as Character.”
Brian Bartels sits down with Adam Rapp–prolific playwright, musician, director, and novelist–to talk about his latest book, Punkzilla, and the mysterious process by which the words we create are shaped by music.
Mr. Mailer entered shortly after the party began, walking with two arm canes, and his presence filled up every available space. When I wasn’t refilling bubbly, I watched, then I wrote. But even what I jotted down in my notebook remains fragmented to this day, a choppy result of overwhelmed giddiness in such company: A girl with bones sticking out of her back; nursing a new belly ring and a half bottle of wine. Chevy luminaries. Pencil guts…
