The state is a writer of bad fiction. They would be shut down in a fiction workshop. My fiction must be more protean, more imaginative, more accurate than what the state produces.

It’s like my mind is a camera, and when I write a scene, I’m visualizing the angle of the shot, and the framing, and the movement.

The Vixen makes an implicit argument for good writing, and even good editing, as a form of political defiance.

To make art, you’ve got to be in a very precarious place all the time. You really have to realize that it’s a dangerous thing you’re doing, and the stakes are very high.

“I might be suggesting that narrative is not a very good way of knowing things,” Akhtar says. “And that part of our philosophical confusion in our crumbling republic may have to do with the fact that everyone has now become a storyteller.”

Some of the more political aspects of Vesper Flights, some of the ways in which I try to talk about class, about privilege, about climate change—I think I would have been too scared to have done that a few years ago.

The National Medal of Arts recipient reflects on the immigration crisis in Afterlife, her first novel for adults in almost 15 years.