Interviews Archive
“Climate change is coming for us all”: An Interview with Matt Bell
Matt Bell’s Appleseed is a sci-fi novel. It is also a re-imagining of a western, a portrayal of a dystopia, and a techno-adventure. Above all, Appleseed is a novel of warning, an air-raid siren of impending environmental collapse.
“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.
“Much of this novel is about queer and trans people fighting to see ourselves as sacred”: An Interview with Zeyn Joukhadar
In Joukhadar’s new novel, during the search for what seems almost to be a mythical bird, and for an explanation as to how exactly a disappeared artist and the protagonist’s mother are linked, Nadir also begins searching for his transgender identity—a separate and daunting migration all his own.
“Those who are still around have an obligation to honor that tragedy but turn it into something else”: An Interview with Hua Hsu
Hua Hsu’s new memoir ends with his decision to go to therapy to attend to his irrational guilt over his friend’s death. It helps him come to the realization that what he wanted to write was not a eulogy but a “true account of the deceased,” one filled with
“If an object entered my life somehow, I would put it in the book and see what happened”: An Interview with Ruth Ozeki
Objects are characters in Ruth Ozeki’s latest novel. And as her masterful structure makes clear, we the readers, like the book’s protagonist, are hearing voices too: the Book has a mind of its own.
“Fiction became a place I made to learn for myself what we have endured”: An Interview with Joseph Han
Joseph Han’s debut novel can be described in a myriad of ways—it’s a ghost story, an immigrant novel, a meditation on the legacy of the Korean War and colonialism, a multi-generational saga, an eco-Hawai’i novel, even a humorous stoner manual.
“We all compartmentalize parts of ourselves to an extent”: An Interview with Katie Gutierrez
Katie Gutierrez’s debut is a novel about time. The driving force of the book is Lore, a woman who once led two lives, keeping two families in two cities. Time is the enemy of the secrets Lore is keeping—and also the necessity writers build on.
“In memoir writing, vulnerability is the highest rigor”: An Interview with Putsata Reang
Putsata Reang’s new memoir delves into the realization that many of her greatest struggles are rooted in the past, under the weight of inherited trauma and filial duty. Even so, Reang unshackles herself from family history and forges an identity of her own.
“I wanted to write towards a kind of healing and recovery”: An Interview with Shelley Wong
Shelley Wong’s debut poetry collection reaches towards a place where people can live a life of depth and multiplicity beyond appearance, a “hypergreen periphery” of plenitude and possibility where “any tree can become a ladder.”
“Grief with animals isn’t the same, and we can learn something from that”: An Interview with Annie Hartnett
By combining the voices of the dead with the experiences of the living, Annie Hartnett builds a sense of community. Her characters are not navigating hardships in isolation but with the support of family and friends, animals and the dead.