Author Archive

“Part of What the Novel is About is the Gimmicks That We Put on as Individuals”: An Interview with Chris McCormick

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Chris McCormick’s debut novel represents American identity—full of choice and individualism, though not in as positive a manner as we would like to believe.

“I’m telling these stories for an audience, but I also want to digest this experience for myself”: An Interview with Poupeh Missaghi

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Poupeh Missaghi’s debut novel follows a protagonist obsessed with finding out why Tehran’s statues are disappearing. It’s an experimental hybrid work that combines a traditional novel narrative with quotes from theorists and writers, dossier-style notes on people who have been made to disappear after death, and poetry.

Tess Fragoulis on The Goodtime Girl

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Fragoulis roots her 2012 novel in the Greco-Turkish blues, including lyrics of well-known rebetiko songs that she has translated to transport the reader into the world of Kivelli—who, like many of her fellow refugees, pours herself into music to forget the trauma of losing everything she has known.

Self-Deception in The Wife

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Meg Wolitzer’s 2003 novel is not a story about how a “great” writer seduced his young student and how their marriage fell apart. It is a story of something far more compelling: a woman who has hidden her talent behind a man.

Reading The Refugee Summer

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Edward Fenton’s 1982 novel is perhaps one of the better fictional accounts of living at the privileged periphery of a political and then refugee crisis. Importantly, it is also a children’s novel.

The American Dream in The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

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Lucette Lagnado’s 2007 memoir is a testament to the difficulties that are so inherent to the immigration process that even a family of people who are educated, upper-class, and well-off experience them.

Corelli’s Mandolin and the Patriarchy

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While the focus of Louis de Bernières’ 1994 book is the love story between a young woman, Pelagia, and Captain Antonio Corelli, one of the many side plots is that of the ruin of Mandras, Pelagia’s first fiancé, at the hands of masculine ideals.

Christos Ikonomou’s Greek Debt Crisis Stories

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The stories of Ikonomou’s new collection revel in ambiguity, illustrating the crisis in a more nuanced way than many of the “crisis lit” works that reach the U.S. Importantly, too, they demonstrate Ikonomou’s gift for Greek in its rawest spoken form.

Grief in Lincoln in the Bardo

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George Saunders’ most recent book acknowledges that to write a historical novel is to look at bones and imagine them as flesh and spirit.

The Position of English

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Jhumpa Lahiri’s work in Italian is reminiscent of liturgy books with Koine Greek on the left side and English on the other. That she includes the “little brother,” a moniker she’s given Italian, in her 2015 book—and on the left side—is a reversal of the norm.