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If you go to a poetry reading, the aphoristic moments are usually where the audience lets out a collective “hmmm” or “ahhh”—almost before the poet has finished the sentence.
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“The miracle, in Kharms, is a kind of rupture within the physical structure of the world.”
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Elizabeth Scanlon discusses her debut full-length collection, Lonesome Gnosis, brains and trains, and poetry as prayer.
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“I always feel like I’m starting over. I don’t know how I ever wrote a poem. I really do have that feeling.”
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Eileen G’Sell discusses her debut collection, Life After Rugby, how and why she chose her book’s title, and challenging gender categories.
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The stories [in THE TRUTH ABOUT ME], like Marburg herself, are insightful, witty, to the point, and told with her wonderfully dry sense of humor.
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The new Editor-in-Chief of The Believer dismantles stereotypes of Las Vegas, discusses the magazine’s acquisition, and makes a case for bringing journalism into the academy.
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Jenny Zhang discusses her story collection Sour Heart, trying to escape the past, collective versus individual responsibility for trauma, and love as imprisonment.
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Poet and essayist Jennifer S. Cheng discusses her collection House A, working “in the dark,” and the idea of home.
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I have known the poet Elizabeth Metzger since kindergarten—and ever since I have known her, she has been a poet. When we played the The Game of Life, a board game, she wrote small lyrics about the futures we ended the game with; when I had a crush, she wrote light verse about the boys […]
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Abigail Ulman talks about her debut collection Hot Little Hands, the limitations of the cultural narrative, her paralyzing pre-publication fears, and why she loves adolescent narrators.
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Rebecca Schiff discusses her debut collection The Bed That Moved, choosing narrators who share similarities with each other and with herself, and whether feminism and fiction-writing conflict.
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Novelist Christopher Boucher talks about writing so-called “experimental” fiction, both embracing and denying the metaphor, and apples.
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Poet Terese Svoboda talks about her biography of the socialist-anarchist firebrand and modernist poet Lola Ridge, Anything That Burns You, and remembers a time when the political was printed in newspapers.
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Robyn Schiff talks about her collection A Woman of Property, the long con of “owning” land, her passion for early novels, how motherhood changed her poetry, and the generative powers of form.
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Jessa Crispin talks about The Dead Ladies Project and The Creative Tarot, founding Bookslut, why she has an antagonistic relationship with the publishing industry, and her estrangement from modern feminism.
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Poet Kathleen Spivack discusses releasing her debut novel Unspeakable Things at age seventy-seven.
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Amy Fusselman discusses her latest memoir/manifesto/philosophical treatise Savage Park, the rise of a new kind of nonfiction, and what kind of art “discombobulates her and makes her scream.”
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Mary Karr talks about her new book The Art of Memoir, the perception of memoir from a “trashy” form, the virtues of poetry, and the complexity of truth-telling.
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It is a world where camp has replaced art. There is something safe and comforting in the smallness of this world; it is a world we recognize.
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