“Readers are always on the side of romance; if two remotely promising people meet, we fan the flames. I wanted to use those expectations and to subvert them.” Mari Coates talks with her mentor Margot Livesey on the occasion of publishing of The Boy in the Field, Livesey’s ninth novel.
“I’m grateful now for having had so many strange work days and stories to hold on to afterward.” Jason Allen talks with Barrett Bowlin about his debut novel, The East End, out next week from Park Row Books.
“We need to ask why we choose the characters we do and what we are trying to communicate with them. We need to challenge our own biases.” Rene Denfeld talks with Kate Lemery about writing, social justice, and The Child Finder, out now in paperback by HarperCollins.
“I am not always writing, but I’m always immersed in the world of a book”: Christina Baker Kline chats with Kate Lemery about her award-winning novel A Piece of the World, now out in paperback from HarperCollins.
“And then it came to me that instead of writing a literary book about motherhood, I’d write a suspenseful book about motherhood”: Aimee Molloy talks about motherhood, the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction, and her debut novel, The Perfect Mother, out next week from HarperCollins.
From the Archives: Chloe Benjamin speaks with her mentor and friend Judith Claire Mitchell about A Reunion of Ghosts, which took ten years to write. Mitchell says of the process, “When students are struggling with their own novels, I do understand what they’re going through and I think I’m often able to give them perspective on the nature of this massive, unwieldy, impossible enterprise that keeps them from giving up.”
“Growing up in Montgomery, I heard stories about the Civil Rights Movement from people who never became famous. That experience had an impact on my storytelling.”
Chloe Benjamin speaks with her mentor and friend Judith Claire Mitchell about A Reunion of Ghosts, which took ten years to write. Mitchell says of the process, “When students are struggling with their own novels, I do understand what they’re going through and I think I’m often able to give them perspective on the nature of this massive, unwieldy, impossible enterprise that keeps them from giving up.”
“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?”
“This willingness to myth-bust is critical to the continuing maturation of books set in the American West,” writes contributor Laura Pritchett in her review of The Home Place. “La Seur is elegant and graceful and quiet in her approach, but she succeeds.”
