Interviews Archive
“Sometimes the poems know things that we don’t know ourselves”: An Interview with Jay Deshpande
Recognizing the ephemerality of their wisdoms, Deshpande allows his poems to exist as monuments to themselves, that we might return to them in the future and experience their lessons anew.
“Writing about motherhood provides a great vantage point from which to write about society”: An Interview with Jessamine Chan
The double-sided expectations are the heart of Jessamine Chan’s debut novel. Motherhood is deeply personal and yet easily judged by Instagram followers and the state alike. Chan’s book asks: Can motherhood be measured by the performance of it?
“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.
“Paris, in its own way, is a character in the book”: An Interview with David Hoon Kim
David Hoon Kim’s debut novel is as much about its protagonist and the characters around him as it is about the city itself, as much about the narrative momentum created through his wanderings as it is about the languages that carry and charge through him.
Reclamation of Authority in Heretic: An Interview with Jeanna Kadlec
In Heretic, Jeanna Kadlec writes a devastatingly thorough critique of evangelicalism as she records her spiritual journey out of fear and into reclaiming authority over her own life.
“Unfortunately, the Book Continues to Be Relevant”: An Interview with Erika Meitner
When Erika Meitner was in the process of adopting her youngest son, she was surprised to discover just how many households in her neighborhood had firearms. Erika Meitner’s new poetry collection uses these two life events to examine safety, violence, and raising a family in rural Appalachia.
“Ultimately, we Black women are singing from the same hymnal, whether we are talking about food, love, our mothers, or the church”: An Interview with Deesha Philyaw
Deesha Philyaw’s debut story collection skillfully blends inward reflection with outward mother-daughter battle, the narratives softened within the larger embrace of a nurturing, cross-generational women’s world that transcends particular times and places.
“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.