Profiles

Dreaming in the Dark

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De Robertis envisioned The President and the Frog as “a love letter to anyone who’s ever felt despair,” she says, “or anyone who looks at climate change, or the spike in open racism, or just the difficulty of navigating daily life in our world.”
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Profiles

Freedom On Her Mind

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"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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Profiles

Fifty Years Later, a New Novel Emerges

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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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Profiles

Anthony Doerr’s Libraries of Wonder

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“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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Profiles

Katie Kitamura Is Incapable of a Hot Take

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It takes me 10 years to figure out what I think. I’ve just learned to resign myself to the fact that I’m never going to be dynamic like that.
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Profiles

Brandon Taylor’s Constellations of Stories

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I went home and wrote my first real short story in a furious rage.
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Profiles

Disinformation Nation: On Francine Prose

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

Filling in the Past: On Nathan Harris’s ‘The Sweetness of Water’

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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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Profiles

Inside the Souvenir Museum with Elizabeth McCracken

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I also tend to write about eccentrics. I’m interested in people who are different because of pure bloody-mindedness. People who do not feel obliged to conform. I’m interested in people who are emotionally different.
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Profiles

Found in Translation: On Jhumpa Lahiri and ‘Whereabouts’

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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.
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Profiles

Maggie Shipstead Wants to Transport You

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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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Profiles

Fact or Fiction: On Vendela Vida’s ‘We Run the Tides’

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A novel, itself a fabrication, can’t exist without poignant truths that spring to the surface through plot and characterization and detail.
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Profiles

On Nature and Nationalism with Sarah Moss

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As she wrote Summerwater, Moss was thinking about the attitudes about public space that emerge in moments of popular nationalism such as Brexit.
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Profiles

Quiet on the Set: William Boyd on His Latest Novel

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I think of a novelist as a magpie rather than a scholar. Anything bright that catches your eye can be brought into the work.
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Profiles

Bryan Washington Is Writing for Himself

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Much of the change that needs to occur in American publishing needs to happen on the masthead front. The whole thing needs an overhaul, but I’m thinking about lasting, substantial, generational change.
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Profiles

The Poetic Fiction of Gabriela Garcia

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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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Profiles

Gina Apostol Gets Meta

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I’d like to go back to Raymundo Mata and look at it again, because of the fake news shit that’s going on right now—to reflect on what this metatextuality means.
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Profiles

Nadia Owusu on Processing Trauma

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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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