From the Archives: Friendship unraveling around exposed ambition – Jacinda Townsend talks with Melissa Scholes Young about competition, solidarity, and the constraints of the wider world.
From the Archives: The award-winning Alexi Zentner on fiction as types of food, pen as talisman, bad music as white noise, and his fellow Canadians, who inspired him to take up the pen.
From the Archives: NoViolet Bulawayo’s stunning debut novel asks difficult questions amid the contrasting landscapes of a Zimbabwe shantytown and bone-chilling Michigan.
From the Archives: “I think characters resist being known in the way real people do. When I start to construct a character, I never begin with their deep dark secrets or biggest fears or hidden shame. I usually start with the surface details—physical features, occupation, interests—and over time, I learn the things the character secretly wants or hates or tries to hide.”
From the Archives: The debut novelist talks to Zachary Watterson about writing religions, communities, and landscapes not his own, all with complexity and compassion.
From the Archives: Your one person dies. Does life’s plot float away like a sinister version of the house in Up? Amelia Gray’s debut novel, Threats, gets cozy with chaos. Anxious? You damn well should be.
From the Archives: “When structure is done well, it should be like architecture: you sense the overall feel of the building—tall, or airy, or strong—but you’re not looking at the buttresses that hold it up or the seams where parts are fastened together.”
“I started this novel because I wanted to write about pick-up basketball, because I loved it, and I didn’t understand why it felt almost holy in my memories…I just wrote about the love and the fulfillment of that experience, and it exposed other things—darker things, more painful things.” Walter Moore talks with J.T. Bushnell about his debut novel, The Step Back.
“My goal is to make fiction that doesn’t read too much like ‘life,’ stories that repress the urges and impulses of characters.” Aaron Hamburger and Avner Landes discuss Landes’s debut novel, Meiselman: The Lean Years, out this week from Tortoise Books.
“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.
