From the Archives: “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.”
From the Archives: Jennifer Solheim reveals how language structure impacts emotional resonance in the narrative—and for the reader.
“This book is not really me looking into that world, but rather me looking out from it. Writing the novel was not so much an intellectual exercise as it was an empathetic one.” Simon Van Booy talks with Jennifer Solheim about his new novel, Night Came with Many Stars.
Jennifer Solheim on the art of telling in Nathacha Appanah’s Tropic of Violence, examining how the author’s “use of perspective and authority might serve as an example of how writers can develop characters whose social identities are different from their own, in ways that are palpable, believable, and move beyond empathy.”
“In ways large and small, the task of a novelist who writes about the past is to make it come to life, to find singular details that make the story breathe”: Christina Baker Kline talks with Jennifer Solheim about her new novel, The Exiles.
“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.
“I think one of the feelings exile produces is a sense of in-between—you’re both within a place and somehow distinctly outside its borders.” Natalie Bakopoulos talks with Jennifer Solheim about her new novel, Scorpionfish, out next week from Tin House Books.
“I love that short stories are tales—that you need to hold somebody’s attention the way you would if you were talking to them. With novels, it’s a Scheherazade situation, and you’re trying to get them to come back and stay.” Carrie Messenger talks with Jennifer Solheim about her debut collection, as well as fairy tales, Eastern European history, translation, and more.
“Ultimately the novel is—at least to me, privately—as much about the act of making a novel as it is telling a story”: Amanda Golblatt talks with Jennifer Solheim about her debut novel, Hard Mouth.
Jennifer Solheim talks with her former StoryStudio teacher, Rebecca Makkai, about research, getting behind a book, and braiding narratives in her new novel, The Great Believers.
