The Millions Interview

Small Moments of Joy: The Millions Interviews Edwidge Danticat

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The MacArthur Fellow talks about immigration and the pull Haiti exerts on her writing.
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Essays

True Fake Fact: Donald Trump Is Andrew Jackson

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Isenberg was not merely sketching Andrew Jackson; she was, chapter and verse, sketching the personal and political biography of…Donald Trump.
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The Millions Interview

I’m a Stained-Glass Guy: The Millions Interviews Kevin Barry

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I’m moving more toward subtraction than addition. Which isn’t to say that the next novel won’t be a big and baggy monster. You change all the time.
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Essays

Fairfield Porter: Artist, Writer, Heretic

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He painted what was in front of him, producing an elegant rebuttal of the claim that it was no longer possible for a figurative painter to say anything new.
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Essays

Martha Cooper: A Reluctant Icon

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She never considered herself an artist. She was always more interested in documenting and preserving subcultures that were destined to blaze and then vanish.
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Reviews

Mama Was a Number Runner: On The World According to Fannie Davis

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A female entrepreneur from the Jim Crow South arrives in the 1950s industrial cauldron of Detroit, determined to figure out “how to make a way out of no way.”
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Essays

Ferlinghetti at 100: An Appreciation

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He’s our longest-living ambassador of the written word, a relic from a time when a certain type of person treated books as sacred objects rather than as products that could be sold at a profit.
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In Memoriam

Literary Obituaries of 2018: Let Us Now Praise the Under-Sung

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Here is a highly selective list of a handful of these wonders, several of whom touched my life in deeply personal ways.
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The Millions Interview

It’s Time We Started Stressing: The Millions Interviews Earl Swift

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We’ve got to come up with a rubric to figure out what do we save, what do we surrender to the sea? We have to be consistent.
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Essays

Is Baseball What’s Wrong with America?

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This larger denial, Mathis posits, leaves white America prone to yearning for a time that never existed. We’ve come, unexpectedly, back to baseball.
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Essays

A Day in the Life of an Indie Publisher: Akashic Books

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Most novels sell only a few thousand copies, and at a big house those writers wind up feeling like a failure. It’s much easier for us to have a success.
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The Millions Interview

Snapshots of Detroit: The Millions Interviews Dominique Morisseau

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If you want to put a hashtag or a flag down, you’ve got to be really careful that you’re not planting that over somebody’s memories.
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Essays

The Cockroach Decade

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It took just $60 to hire somebody to kill somebody. A loft rented for $350 a month. A double feature of foreign films at the Carnegie Hill Cinema cost $1.50. The World Trade Center loomed in the distance “like twin phosphorescent robots.”
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The Millions Interview

The Next Great American Crime Writer May Be Living in Norway

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"It’s like walking a high wire without a net, but it’s a second career and it’s a chance to turn a corner. I feel I can really appreciate it at this point in my life because it’s the first job I’ve ever had where it’s just absolute blue sky."
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In Memoriam

Those Who Left Us: Select Literary Obituaries of 2017

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Poets, editors, songwriters, teachers, journalists, novelists—some great writers and some under-sung ones left us this year. Here is a selective compendium of literary obituaries from 2017.
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Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Bill Morris

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What a glorious moral cesspool!—where the cleanest guy in town is the one who gets paid to kill people, and always earns his paycheck.
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Essays

How It Feels When Another Writer Beats You to the Punch

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I think there’s no place or no story that exists that wouldn’t be written about differently by different writers. And that’s fine. That’s good.
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The Millions Interview

Reconciling America’s Original Sin: The Millions Interviews Deanne Stillman

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I think it’s kind of a universal situation—that sooner or later we often find ourselves accepted for being one thing, but in our hearts we’re something else.
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