Interviews Archive

“I’m considering and reconsidering ideas of storytelling and history within a family”: An Interview with Emma Hine

Author: | Categories: Interviews No comments
Emma Hine’s debut collection of poetry, out earlier this year, is a book focused on three sisters that behaves like a constellation surrounded by an ever-blackening sky.

“When you’re in the middle of it, you’re not necessarily doing the right thing or being the good character in a story”: An interview with Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Author: | Categories: Interviews No comments
Set in 1971, just three years after the Mexican government massacred student protestors at Tlatelolco, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s seventh novel follows a bored secretary and a member of the anti-communist paramilitary organization the Hawks as they both find themselves looking for a missing young woman.

“Nothing lasts, nothing is solid, as much as we think it will be”: An Interview with Matt W. Miller

Author: | Categories: Interviews No comments
Matt W. Miller’s fourth book chronicles in documentary poetics the history of the Merrimack River, braiding together its many voices from the perspective of the twenty-first century, when the insistence of memory resides everywhere and in everything: people, the river, the land, industry, relationships—in short, in one’s spirit.

“I’m not sure we ever arrive at wholeness”: An Interview with Ethel Rohan

Author: | Categories: Interviews No comments
Ethel Rohan’s stories are expertly laced with opposition and convergence, a curled fist and an open palm. Her most recent collection—out this week—features relationships rife with both dissonance and confluence, characters in pairs and triads stretching away and snapping back together.

“All memoirists are the narrator and the character at once”: An Interview with Lilly Dancyger

Author: | Categories: Interviews No comments
Lilly Dancyger’s just-released mixed media memoir is a story of two artists, forever separated, and the history and symbols that provide an artistic shorthand able to move past the boundaries of shared experiences and meet again.

“A lot of the novel is about stories—the ones we tell ourselves about ourselves, the ones we don’t know but that shape us in some way”: An Interview with Gabriela Garcia

Author: | Categories: Interviews No comments
Gabriela Garcia’s non-chronological debut novel, built on glimpses of memory and history, digs into issues of cultural identity, social and political unrest, and the complexities of lives informed by migration, oppression, and racial inequality.

“These two books, taken together, offer a nice survey of my anxieties and preoccupations over the past decade”: An Interview with J. Robert Lennon

Author: | Categories: Interviews No comments
J. Robert Lennon’s new novel and short story collection, both released last week, offer up an aesthetic of the uncompromising, the surprising, and the fantastic, either cloaked in the everyday or surreally spread.

“What are the conditions of contemplation to exist in an alien planet?”: An Interview with Mauro Javier Cárdenas

Author: | Categories: Interviews No comments
Reading Cárdenas’s second novel, with its intricately patterned sentences circling obsessively around an absent center, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the author has done something remarkable, inventing an entirely original language for representing the fractured sensation of being conscious in the twenty-first century.

“I really try to let the characters speak for themselves”: An Interview with Brandon Hobson

Author: | Categories: Interviews No comments
Hobson’s latest novel is a brilliant, artfully crafted story of Native heritage, family dynamics, and ancestral hope.

“Editing is the great joy of writing”: An Interview with Michael Bible

Author: | Categories: Interviews No comments
Bible is a careful craftsman, cutting his new novel down to its core without losing a diverse cast of characters, a clearly rendered town, and wholly realized emotional resonance. He doesn’t overexplain, doesn’t excessively detail, and doesn’t deviate from the novel’s heart.