With both their debut volumes of poetry appearing this year, the mother and daughter discuss collaboration, pronouns, and the imperative not to look away. Madeleine Barnes and Michelle Maher embody an ode to the family. In the era of viral elegy, in a winter where World War III is trending, […]
An Interview | Susan Choi on Adolescence, Memory, and the World of Arts Education
Susan Choi’s new novel Trust Exercise, a National Book Award Finalist, is a brilliant, inventive, and deeply thought-provoking exploration of the ways in which we tell our stories and the inherent tensions between individual and collective experience.
Now/here Fast: An Interview with Chris Campanioni
The hybrid writer discusses his latest book, the Internet is for real, and new horizons for identity in the digital age. Chris Campanioni wants to know if I think his newest book, the Internet is for real, is productively excessive. The request surprises me—not for its candor, but for the […]
An Interview | Danniel Schoonebeek
Over the past few years, I’ve seen Danniel Schoonebeek read three times, mostly from poems that appeared in his book Trébuchet. At every reading, I got the kind of spiritual and political catharsis that I’m always looking for in great writing. In both American Barricade (YesYes Books, 2014) and Trébuchet […]
An Interview | Julie Orringer
Julie Orringer is the author of two award-winning books: The Invisible Bridge, a New York Times bestselling novel, and How to Breathe Underwater, a collection of stories; her new novel, The Flight Portfolio, tells the story of Varian Fry, the New York journalist who went to Marseille in 1940 to save writers and artists blacklisted by the Gestapo. All her work has been published by Alfred A. Knopf, and her books have been translated into twenty languages. Her stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Granta Book of the American Short Story and The Scribner Anthology of American Short Fiction. She is the winner of the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children, and is at work on a novel set in New Orleans.
An Interview | R.O. Kwon
R.O. Kwon is the author of The Incendiaries, a stunning novel that explores the fresh pain of loss and the lure of the absolute. Psychologically deep and haunting, the story is set on the campus of a Northeastern college and told from the perspective of three characters: Will Kendall, a […]
An Interview | Madeleine George
Madeleine George is an award-winning playwright and author. Her plays include Hurricane Diane, The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence, Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England, Precious Little, and The Zero Hour, and have been produced across the country. She was a founding member of 13P (Thirteen Playwrights, Inc.), the Obie-winning playwright’s collective, […]
An Interview | Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li is the author of two story collections, two novels, and, most recently, a book of essays called Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. When I read her novel Kinder than Solitude, I was just beginning to take writing seriously, and the psychic familiarity of her characters spooked […]
An Interview | Lisa Ko
Lisa Ko is the author of the much-acclaimed The Leavers, which won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction. The novel follows the story of an undocumented immigrant woman and her child in the U.S. – a story […]
An Interview | Phil Klay
Phil Klay is the author of the short story collection Redeployment, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2014. He’s a graduate of the MFA program at CUNY Hunter, and a Marine Corps Veteran who deployed to Iraq. I met Phil a year after I left the military and returned to […]
An Interview | Monet Hurst-Mendoza
Monet Hurst-Mendoza is an accomplished NYC-based playwright from LA. Rising Circle Theater Collective, Looking Glass Theatre (NYC), Amios, Playwright’s Playground at Classical Theatre of Harlem, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and many others have developed her plays. She is a current member of the 2017 Emerging Writers Group at The Public […]
An Interview | Mary Gaitskill
Mary Gaitskill is the writer of three story collections, three novels and, most recently, a book of essays called Somebody with a Little Hammer. She was my teacher last summer at the New York State Writers’ Institute, where my classmates and I hiked, ate several kinds of fruit pie right […]