Interviews
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The Present in Its Most Vivid Colors: A Conversation with Ben Shattuck
What does a growth of new grass on a hillside in spring make you feel? Is it a mixture of nostalgia and hope? Or what does a distant mountain range wreathed in a crown of clouds make you feel?
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Clock time has really lost all meaning: An interview with Jos Charles
Some work must be done up very close.
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Bringing the Exterior into our Private Rooms: A Conversation with Victoria Chang
There’s no reason for cruelty; the joy is in the writing. I always try to remember why I started doing this thing: Because I had to. It’s not a choice for many of us writers to write, but we do…
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why deer and poetry mix so well: A conversation with Caitlin Scarano
When you say, “Oh I run, but I’m not a runner,” it’s like when people say, “Oh I write, but I’m not a writer.” You’re doing it. You just do it and it does get better and there are simple…
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I Don’t Sing to Be Heard, I Do It to Keep On: An interview with Ashanti Anderson
“It is impossible to be at peace without understanding.”
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Life is Damage: A Conversation with Claire Messud
If you’re interested in character, then you’re interested in perspective, and intimacy, and in the distinctions—and distance—between one person’s mind and another’s.
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Running Straight Into the Devastation: Reyna Grande Goes to War
Reyna Grande is the author of several books, including the bestselling memoir, The Distance Between Us, (Atria, 2012) and the sequel, A Dream Called Home, released in 2018. Her latest novel, A Ballad of Love and Glory is a sweeping historical saga…
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Candy from Strangers: A Conversation with Jennifer Egan
We can try to perform our inner lives, but we can’t actually reveal them. We can create a simulacrum, which is so much of what I see on social media, and that simulacrum is entertainment. It’s exciting because we all…
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The Subconscious Repository of Weird Things: A Conversation with Ananda Lima
Poetry allows me to say the thing without a million conjectures. It leaves a lot of space and allows words to resonate and connect without me having to take you there . . . because of the conventions of poetry,…
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Looking for Trouble: A Conversation with Maud Newton
Are these stories true? Did my great grandfather really kill someone with a hay hook? Was my other great grandfather really a communist?
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Doomscrolling in Novel Form: A Conversation with John Elizabeth Stintzi
You’ll really love this book if you have the opinion that reality is weird. And if you think, like me, that the fact that so many people believe that there’s even a steady thing that we could call reality is…
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Witches, Mushrooms, Collective Voices, and Catalan: A Conversation with Irene Solà and Mara Faye Lethem
Remember the little green dolls in Toy Story that live in a vending machine, the claw is their god and they go “The Claw!” and cower away? I imagined the mushrooms in the same way, except their claw is the…