Tag: interviews

“It’s difficult to say what you really think. You’re too aware of the traps, the dead ends, the cul-de-sacs of utterance: all the ways we let cliché steer us in a certain direction, force us to say not quite what we mean…”

Tessa Hadley on gaining the sense of authority she needed to write fiction, the authors whose work opens the door for her to write, and the way we are formed by our connections with other people.

Science journalist Alice Robb on why we need to take our dreams seriously.

Guy Gunaratne’s Man Booker-longlisted “In Our Mad and Furious City” recognizes multiple, overlapping versions of London and its inhabitants, examining the ways violence can bubble up through the city’s fissures.

For author Jaclyn Gilbert, revising her writing is much like doing the same running loops over and over, to the point where she doesn’t have to think about where she’s going anymore.

Sohaila Abdulali wants us to pay attention to what we’ve been missing when we talk about rape, meaning everything from how we fail to address rape as a global crisis to how survivors experience PTSD at the dentist.

Musician Emily Rose Epstein talks about her dual life as a rock drummer and writer.

Journalist John O’Connor talks about writing his epic Oxford American magazine feature on musician Link Wray.

Howard Hughes used gossip, spies and money to control Hollywood’s women for nearly 60 years. Karina Longworth critically examines the Golden Age’s gossip to stop his false narratives from becoming our history.

Nic and his father David Sheff’s memoirs about grappling with Nic’s addiction are the basis for the new movie ‘Beautiful Boy.’ It was important to them that the movie communicate what addiction really is — an illness.

“It was important to me that the ‘villains’ in the book were ordinary people, because readers are ordinary people, and people who do terrible things are often ordinary people.”

Barbara Kingsolver takes a rigorous, scientific approach to her novels’ subjects — but, as a woman writer, her authority is often challenged.

Memoirist Tanya Marquardt talks about consent, trauma, and investigating our memories in the age of #MeToo.

Rebecca Traister talks about the revolutionary power of women’s anger.

Nicole Chung wants white parents of transracial adoptees to grapple more candidly with the reality of racism in America.

In “Night Moves,” Jessica Hopper is 80% on her bike and 20% at a show, memorializing a young adulthood spent in just one of “a million Chicagos” — but one that shaped a wide network of artists and writers.

Eli Saslow says the push and pull of resistance (from angry classmates) and civil discourse (with others willing to be kind to him) is what changed Derek Black.

The author of “Heartland,” a National Book Award longlisted memoir about growing up poor in rural America, gives her views on politics, identity, and cultural appropriation.

Merve Emre on the history of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

Sjón’s “CoDex 1962” is the fulfillment of a pact he made with the Maharal of Prague in the Old Jewish Cemetery almost three decades ago.

“One-eighth of all natural pregnancies begin as twins,” Leah Dieterich writes in her memoir, “but early in pregnancy, one twin becomes less viable and is compressed against the wall of the uterus or absorbed by the other twin.” This concept of a vanishing twin, a term coined in the year of Dieterich’s birth, frames the […]

Olivia Laing’s new novel, “Crudo,” is a fictionalized account of the summer of 2017, written in real time by Laing — from the perspective of Kathy Acker.

Lucie Greene’s new book “Silicon States” is about the danger of concentrating so much power in so few hands.

In Ling Ma’s “Severance” — a novel she began to write after getting laid off, while living partly on severance pay — the characters keep going to work, even though they know it’s the end of the world.

“When I write, I’m creating a character, and then I’m just performing that character, and typing what they say.”

“When I started asking myself questions about my own notions of masculinity. I just felt so limited, so suddenly afraid of becoming the kind of man I’d grown up in fear of.”

“If I couldn’t find humor in sobriety, I probably wouldn’t make it.”

Nate Chinen may have been the last full-time jazz reviewer at any American newspaper. He says jazz hasn’t been in a better place since the ’60s — but the commercial infrastructure is broken.

To this day, when my mother is driving a car, she will only use the blinkers to indicate that she’s turning at the last second — just so that people behind her don’t know where she’s going.

Not only will I never get my faith back, but I’m going to keep missing it. I’ll always have that longing — but there’s no going back into the garden.