“When I look at that dress and how much intention went into the making of it…it’s like we want to have something that can’t be destroyed, because so much of the past has been destroyed…”
novel
Posted inStory
‘I’m Incredulous That People Do This Repeatedly. The Second Book Thing Is So Real.’
Mary H.K. Choi discusses her latest novel, which examines how “holograms and digital envoys” represent us online, and why it feels like her “second book signals the death of my first.”
Posted inBooks, Fiction, History, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘Nobody in This Book Is Going to Catch a Break’: Téa Obreht on “Inland”
‘The history of the West is a deeply turbulent one… that kept the living population in a constant state of unrest. I thought this constant state of unrest must be true for the dead as well.’
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘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.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story
‘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.
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, Profiles & Interviews, Science Fiction, Story
Working Through the Apocalypse: An Interview with Ling Ma
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.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story
The Word ‘Hole’
The first page was blank. On the second page, in an almost illegible calligraphic script, was written “Manifesto for a House in the Sky.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
My Brother Comes to Moscow
An excerpt from Keith Gessen’s new novel, A Terrible Country, in which two very different brothers argue over the care of their aging grandmother. “We had had many arguments, but he was my brother; he had always been my brother.”
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story
The Girl Who Slept with God
An excerpt from Val Brelinski’s debut novel, about three daughters who’ve been raised by devout evangelical Christians in Idaho.