How Yasmin Zaher Wrote the Year’s Best New York City Novel
"This is going to sound absurd, but in a novel, you can say the truth, and in journalism, you cannot."
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Juliet Escoria Wants to Bring Back Fistfights
In internet fights, people use this faux veneer of politeness, where they will veil something nasty with corporate HR language, and I find it morally repugnant.
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Glynnis MacNicol on Marriage, Pleasure, and Orgasmic Narratives
"There’s no sense in a capitalist society that enjoying your life should be the basis for anything."
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Gabriel Smith Writes Like He Has Nothing Left to Lose
"I think that almost all of the work under the 'autofiction' banner is politically corrupt."
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Adelle Waldman on Her
‘Nickel and Dimed’–Inspired Novel
"I think too many people—and I include myself in this—find ways of staying insulated from that reality."
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Yael van der Wouden Wants to Touch Everything
"The moment the sex turns gratuitous you lose the tension, and therein the emotional investment of your readers."
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Lilly Dancyger Is Rethinking the Ethics of Memoir
"I do think that we, as writers, owe things to the people in our lives that we care about."
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Why Write Memoir? Two Debut Authors Weigh In
"It was hard on many levels, and I had to keep going back to why I was writing in the first place."
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“You Can Almost Hear the Ghosts”:
Valeria Luiselli on Juan Rulfo
"Rulfo travels in time and space with an absolute freedom without us getting lost."
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Kate Briggs Isn’t Trying to Be Original
"I’ve never been interested in making a claim to originality."
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Álvaro Enrigue Won’t Romanticize Mexican History
"'You Dreamed of Empires' is at open war with the romantic representations of the Mexican past."
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Yomi Adegoke Contains Multitudes
People struggle to hold multiple ideas in their heads at once, and so attempt to pigeonhole female writers, but I am very comfortable leaning into duality.
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Xochitl Gonzalez Wants to Reframe Art History
"The only reason I was interested in the story was to give Ana Mendieta agency."
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Dan Sinykin on Fiction, Scholarship, and Academic Twitter
"Academic Twitter is something of a compulsion for me. My wife hates it."
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Leslie Jamison Serves the ‘God of Complexity’
"My early personal writing leaned so far towards certain kinds of self-recrimination that I had to learn how to lean away from it."
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