“If you have the depth, the surface can be as light as it’s possible to make it…I don’t mind that ‘Swimming Home’ is sometimes described as a ‘beach read’ — actually that’s a triumph.”
Tobias Carroll
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Science & Nature, Story
‘I Went Quiet…and That Allowed Me To Understand’: The Life of a Molecatcher
Marc Hamer discusses life, death, and the lost art of catching a mole.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘My Teachers Said We Weren’t Allowed To Use Them.’
How Cecelia Watson learned to stop worrying and love the semicolon.
Posted inStory
‘I Surprise Myself With This Refusal To Let Go’: Kate Zambreno on the ‘Ghostly Correspondence’
“I thought for sure, I’ll never write about Rilke again. I’m done with Rilke! I’m sick of Rilke! Rilke — no more. But then the other day … I just started researching something about Rilke.”
Posted inNonfiction
‘The Underland Is a Deeply Human Realm’: Getting Down with Robert Macfarlane
“I thought the underland would be — of all the landscape forms that have drawn me to explore them — the most uninhabited. This proved wildly incorrect.”
Posted inStory
Kristen Arnett on Taxidermy, Memory, and “Mostly Dead Things”
“What’s considered high art? What’s lowbrow? What are those things? That’s something that, as a person who like, lives at 7-Eleven, I’m extremely interested in.”
Posted inBooks, Fiction, History, Profiles & Interviews, Science & Nature, Story
Namwali Serpell on Doing the Responsible Thing — Writing an Irresponsible Novel
“I joke that this is the great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for.”
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
Irvine Welsh on Brexit, Existential Panic, and His Latest ‘Trainspotting’ Sequel
“The books from ‘Trainspotting’ onwards have been about deindustrialization … the cruel existential panic that we feel, in the sense that we don’t really know what we’re here for anymore.”
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story, Writing
Sarah Moss on Brexit, Borders, Bog Bodies, and the ‘Foundation Myths of a Really Damaged Country’
Sarah Moss’s tale of Iron Age reenactors and parental abuse is her way of addressing Brexit. “Putting the skulls of the ancestors up in some attempt to hold back history never works.”
Posted inBooks, Profiles & Interviews, Story, Writing
I Would Never Say That, But the Character, He Said It: An Interview with Catherine Lacey
“When I write, I’m creating a character, and then I’m just performing that character, and typing what they say.”