Interviews

JESS WALTER FOLLOWED A CONVOLUTED PATH into the literary mainstream: He was a newspaper reporter who became a nonfiction author who became a ghostwriter who became a mystery novelist who became a literary novelist who also writes screenplays. But no matter the genre,  Walter’s work is stamped with vivid watermarks—prose that blends rapid-fire rants with unerring rhythm, … Read more

Lydia Millet discovered that she loved the desert when she attended the University of Arizona’s MFA program. And though she didn’t stay in the program, she returned to live in the desert a decade later—a wild, expansive setting fitting for both her fiction and her environmental advocacy. Millet is the author of six novels and, most … Read more

PRAGEETA SHARMA IS THE DIRECTOR of the MFA program at the University of Montana and author of three poetry collections, Bliss to Fill, The Opening Question, and Infamous Landscapes. When asked about a guiding notion for The Opening Question, she answered, “I started with the idea of a kind of unabashed confrontation with disappointment and worked towards a way of reeling … Read more

Richard Russo was born and raised in the “Glove Cities,” Johnstown and Gloversville, New York, which would become the backdrop for many of his novels. In a 2007 interview with NPR, he said, “I’ve always had the distinct feeling that there was a ghost version of myself still living back in that place that’s still so … Read more

It’s difficult to read a Matthew Dickman poem and not uncover some essential nugget of humanity. His debut collection, Alt-American Poem, charts a wavering world of involved pleasures and intense dramas, where any experience is worth mining, be it a morning trip to die farmers’ market or ruminations on suicide. While acutely aware of grief, his … Read more

The fiction of Robert Lopez occurs in a world simultaneously oppressive and hilarious, in which people fail to recognize their spouses or lovers, in which something is wrong but it’s not clear what, in which characters are subjected to a kind of imprisonment they don’t understand and, at first glance, hardly seem to care about. But … Read more

In Blake Butler’s work, the ordinary world is made and remade, the familiar becomes strange, the quotidian becomes uncanny, haunted: families discover their own doubles living among them; homes retain their usual dimensions on the outside, but inside are doubling and expanding with secret passages and dark tunnels and strange rooms; caterpillars mysteriously overrun mailboxes and … Read more

Erin Belieu’s poetry moves. Each line break holds the potential for a rapid expansion of the poem’s emotional and imaginative reach. The result is sometimes unsettling, sometimes relieving, sometimes hilarious, but always wonderfully consuming. To enter a Belieu poem is to surrender to the paradoxes of the heart and mind, and reading her work feels like … Read more

Major Jackson’s poetry is clear, fluent, and musical, sometimes relying on formal structure, sometimes referencing pop culture, and often investigating how seemingly disparate subjects can interact and inform each other. He asserts that a poem “becomes a kind of time capsule,” and as such, can contain references to both Kanye West and ancient Greek mythology, … Read more

David Shields is one of today’s most controversial writers and also one of the most passionate. Jonathan Lethem says of Shields: “While on the one hand I feel the urge to compare Shields to the very most incisive and smart contemporary essayists I know—Phillip Lopate and Vivian Gornick and Geoff Dyer— in another sense he’s accomplished … Read more