Interviews Archive

“We shouldn’t just turn inward when we walk”: An Interview with Kent Russell

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Russell’s most recent book, chronicling a walk from the panhandle of Florida to the celestial city of Miami, comes to the conclusion that a walking journey should not only be a journey about the self, but also about how the self exists in a built environment.

“My intention in everything I ever write is to leave no traces of quotidian design”: An Interview with Carlos Lara

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Lara’s latest collection of poetry is avowedly anti-thematic, anti-linear, post-itself. It is, in the speaker's own words, simply "some moments imbued with the crass economy of self."

“It’s the coolest part about writing, that you never know where it is going to wash up”: An Interview with Maggie Smith

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Smith’s first nonfiction offering is a product of a project she took on in a time of grief: she took to Twitter to offer herself a daily public pep talk in the form of three sentences or less. The resulting works, segmented in the book by paragraphs of hindsight

“The characters in the novel are shameless about their bodies”: An Interview with K-Ming Chang

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Part myth, part bildungsroman, part queer love story with a lyric, fabulist delivery, Chang’s debut novel, out today, is a novel of the body—its mundane functions, its power to create life, the ways in which it decays—as well as what can be done to a body—by war, from domestic

“When does that line between the real and imagined begin to blur?”: An Interview with Sulaiman Addonia

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While Addonia’s new novel gives us innumerable examples of what is missing from the lives of his characters, living in a refugee camp after their country is swept into war, each is combatted with a bout of illusion, a tactic to conquer the absences and to enliven what remains:

“Racism makes it difficult to love yourself”: An Interview with Matthew Salesses

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Salesses has written a novel of doppelgängers that begins forging its own double, attempting to confront the vast problems of racial inequality both in its plot and in its meta-structure, asking if there might be a parallel world for our own, one where these injustices could be corrected—or if

“Life is about change—whether we like it or not”: An Interview with Margot Livesey

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Obsession, loss of innocence, grief, forgiveness, belonging. Readers of Livesey’s impressive oeuvre will recognize these recurring themes; each one of her novels animates different variations on these experiences. Her ninth novel, out today, explores them, too, via a seamless kaleidoscopic narrative and artful suspense that propels the story along.

“One only reads a novel for the first time once”: An Interview with Alex Landragin

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Landragin’s new book can be read in paginated order, moving through each of the three books within in turn, or it can be read in the “Baroness Sequence,” which leads the reader through all three books simultaneously, following notes within page footers à la the Choose Your Own Adventure

“If somebody translates your poem and you consider going back to revise it, that’s a good translation.”: An Interview with Ariel Francisco

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Francisco’s newest book, presented simultaneously in English and Spanish, is that of a young poet matured, leaning into the naturalist observations present in his previous work and writing haiku with the precision and wisdom of a sure-handed veteran—while infusing them with a trademark sardonic wit.

“I Wanted to Create Some New Legends for Appalachian Women”: An Interview with Amy Jo Burns

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Burns’s new novel resurrects the experience of women in Appalachia rather than letting their stories be buried while their husbands’s live on.