Sofie Verraest talks with Lydia Davis about her new book, Essays One, as well as the difference between writing essays and stories, the role of “coherence” in each genre, the climate crisis and the role of writers, and more.
“What I love is the defamiliarization.” Kent Kosack appreciates the aesthetic openness of Catherine Lacey’s short story “The Healing Center.”
The form of motherhood is beautifully banal: Melissa Scholes Young on the interplay between form and meaning in Lydia Kiesling’s debut novel.
“Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Welcome Home alongside a new collection of Lucia Berlin’s short stories, Evening in Paradise, on the same day as the midterm elections last week. A knowing wink from the publisher to the politics that these books contain? Perhaps.”
“Is it possible for us to solve a problem our ancestors struggled with and by doing so liberate not only ourselves but also them, retroactively, and allow them repose as well? Reversing the direction of time’s arrow was an idea I wanted to explore in this novel.”
“What is the purpose of one culture translating another? One reason Slavic departments thrive during political crises would seem to be so that we can better understand the cultures of the post-Soviet East. Another reason, though, may be something more akin to the motives of the CIA in translating Doctor Zhivago.”
“These are complex emotional states that capture the performance of intimacy and affection”: Heather Ryan on Garth Greenwell’s debut novel, What Belongs to You.
“So little of the book was clear to me when I began writing”: Garth Greenwell discusses What Belongs to You, his debut novel from Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, with Mary Stewart Atwell.
“I think influence is everywhere, right? We are influenced by places, people, what we overhear, what we see, what we do and what is done to us, various states of being.”
In the introduction to their forthcoming translation of Apollo in the Grass: Selected Poems, by Aleksandr Kushner, Carol Ueland and Robert Carnevale write that “translators simply have to admit that most of the music of most all lyric poetry, and most of its phenomenal presence, stay at home, in the native tongue. But ‘music of language’ is a metaphor.” Ian Singleton examines how this claim plays out in their translation of Kushner’s poetry.
Stories We Love: “White Angel,” by Michael Cunningham
Stories We Love: Donald Barthelme’s “The School,” In Which is Revealed the Meaning of Life
Stories We Love: "A Small, Good Thing" by Raymond Carver
Stories We Love: "The Fall River Axe Murders," by Angela Carter
Stories We Love: "Incarnations of Burned Children"
