“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.”
Fiction
America Is Still Hard To Find
Kathleen Alcott’s latest novel is a dramatic reenactment of the ethical dilemmas posed in antiwar activist Father Daniel Berrigan’s ’60s manifesto.
High Expectations: LSD, T.C. Boyle’s Women, and Me
“Outside Looking In” dramatizes the discovery of LSD and the cult of personality surrounding Timothy Leary. Our reviewer drops acid and thinks about how, for women, it can be safer to be a downer.
‘The Home Is a Place as Wild as Any in the World.’
Chia-Chia Lin talks about the wildness of domestic spaces and writing her novel “The Unpassing” through the early months of motherhood.
The Women Characters Rarely End Up Free: Remembering Rachel Ingalls
The recently re-appreciated novelist Rachel Ingalls passed away last month. She was among a cohort of twentieth-century women writers who were ‘famous for not being famous.’
Lock Your Doors?
A new homeowner reads two novels that revolve around surreal home-invasion scenarios, and considers what it is about his house that scares him.
‘I Don’t Think Those Feelings of Self-Doubt Ever Go Away.’
Susan Choi talks about feeling unsure of oneself, as a writer, as a performer — or as a victim — and about how her latest novel evolved in uncanny tandem with the real world.
‘I’m Always Writing Against This Idea That Denver’s a White Space.’
Kali Fajardo-Anstine talks about her new short story collection “Sabrina & Corina,” her obsession with dualities, and Chicano and Indigenous history in Denver.
‘Craft Is My Belief System. My Obligation To Writing Is Religious.’
Nathan Englander talks about the “super-American world” of Orthodox Judaism, Philip Roth’s funeral, and training himself to write his new novel “kaddish.com” while daydreaming.
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.”
