The Lighter Side of Dan Chaon
I had a dystopian idea in the beginning, and in the end the dystopia caught up with me.
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Welcome to the Future: On Jennifer Egan’s ‘The Candy House’
We can quantify human experience but where does individuality fit in? We are predictable creatures, yet there’s a marvelous unknowability about us.
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Freedom On Her Mind
"But once I started to think about cruelty as being compressed space or choices, humiliation or violence, its opposite seemed to be freedom. Then I became interested in writing about it. There’s no more vexed word, with all the things freedom means to different people.”
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Fifty Years Later, a New Novel Emerges
The winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, Soyinka is coming out with his first novel in almost 50 years, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth.
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Anthony Doerr’s Libraries of Wonder
“The library was practically a babysitter. You could leave yourself and enter worlds. It’s such a rich life when you get to be a reader. Books can give you multiple lives.”
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Filling in the Past: On Nathan Harris’s ‘The Sweetness of Water’
What did it feel like to be these people in this time in history? The power of imagination is very strong. I’ve written my own story, sourced it from the air. I wanted to immerse readers in that world, rural Georgia in 1865.
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Maggie Shipstead Wants to Transport You
Right then, Shipstead recalls, “I decided to write about a female aviator.” The adapted quote became the first line of Great Circle: “I was born to be a wanderer.”
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The Poetic Fiction of Gabriela Garcia
When I wrote this book, I had the ambitious idea of combining all these different threads I was obsessed with: Cuba, America, detention, deportation, addiction, privilege.
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Nadia Owusu on Processing Trauma
To heal I would need to look inward as well as outward. I would need to examine my memories. I would need to interrogate the stories I told myself—about myself, about my family, about the world.
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Sprawling Messes Are What I Aim For: The Millions Interviews Chris Ware
I’ve changed as a person while working on it, reflected both in how I draw and in how I write, and the nation has changed as well, which I’ve tried to acknowledge and incorporate.
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