Interviews Archive
“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.
“I really try to let the characters speak for themselves”: An Interview with Brandon Hobson
Hobson’s latest novel is a brilliant, artfully crafted story of Native heritage, family dynamics, and ancestral hope.
“To write about Geppetto is to write about fatherhood, and at the same time he is a creator of a monster”: An Interview with Edward Carey
Pinocchio is such a fixture of culture that most authors would be too nervous to interact with the classic story in any extended way. Edward Carey’s latest novel is audacious in this regard, giving us the untold tale of Geppetto in bold illustration and dynamic, resonant text.
“Editing is the great joy of writing”: An Interview with Michael Bible
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.
“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.
“We are this horrible animal, all of us”: An Interview with Gina Tron
If we are to rest on the definition of poetry Major Jackson has offered, American poets “write in the wake of a long tradition of resistance.” In responding to American violence with both intimacy and anger on the page, Tron engages in just such an act of resistance.
“We shouldn’t just turn inward when we walk”: An Interview with Kent Russell
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.