Interviews Archive
“Nothing lasts, nothing is solid, as much as we think it will be”: An Interview with Matt W. Miller
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.
“People are messy. What does it even mean to be likable?”: An Interview with Kristen Arnett
Much of Kristen Arnett’s second novel is about how we craft our stories to fit our needs, especially when we feel trapped, or frightened.
“I see fiction as restoring to the world some of its actual complexity”: An Interview with Gish Jen
Like all of Gish Jen’s work, her most recent book is many things: a baseball novel, a bildungsroman, a protest novel. At the center are her characters—complicated, flawed, and likeable. We root for them all.
“I’m not sure we ever arrive at wholeness”: An Interview with Ethel Rohan
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
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
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
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.
“Girlhood is a much darker, more complex—more amazing—experience than what that association suggests”: An Interview with Melissa Febos
The essays of Febos’s new essay collection read less like a coming-of-age story than they do like a manifesto of all the ways girlhood takes a toll on a girl’s life, as well as of the cultural experience of being a woman.
“I absolutely wanted to present an upturned tale of exploration and resource gathering and success”: An Interview with Chang-rae Lee
Chang-rae Lee’s latest novel illuminates the complex economic and cultural exchange between East and West through humorous and often grotesque scenes that question norms of race, money, privilege, and consent.
“What are the conditions of contemplation to exist in an alien planet?”: An Interview with Mauro Javier Cárdenas
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.