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  • 02.27.20
    Unfinished Business
    On Writing

    Unfinished Business

    I sometimes think I was born reading...I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me. In Vivian Gornick's new book, Unfinished Business, she brings us a celebration of passionate reading, of...

    Vivian Gornick & Alexandra Schwartz In Conversation

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  • 01.30.20
    Laying Bare the Dignity of Queer Desire
    On Writing

    Laying Bare the Dignity of Queer Desire

    In Cleanness, the highly anticipated follow-up to his beloved debut, What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell deepens his exploration of foreignness, obligation, and desire. Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. In this atmosphere of...

    Garth Greenwell & Andrea Lawlor In Conversation

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  • 11.08.19
    The Passage of Time
    On Writing

    The Passage of Time

    No novel in recent memory has spoken more movingly to contemporary readers about the nature of love than André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name. First published in 2007, the book recently became an Academy Award–winning film starring Timothée Chalamet as the young...

    André Aciman & Tomi Obaro In Conversation

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  • 10.25.19
    On Division
    On Writing

    On Division

    In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, just a block or two up from the East River on Division Avenue, Surie Eckstein is soon to be a great-grandmother. Her ten children range in age from thirteen to thirty-nine. Her in-laws, postwar immigrants from Romania, live on the first...

    Goldie Goldbloom & Cheryl Sucher In Conversation

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  • 09.20.19
    The Era of Climate in Fiction
    On Writing

    The Era of Climate in Fiction

    Two writers grapple with climate change in fiction, nonfiction—and real life. Amitav Ghosh, the award-winning author of the Ibis Trilogy returns with his new novel, Gun Island. When a Bengali legend from childhood comes to haunt the lonely life of a rare books...

    Amitav Ghosh & Nathaniel Rich In Conversation

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  • 08.23.19
    A Bit of Unfinished Business
    On Writing

    A Bit of Unfinished Business

    Karen Olsson’s stirring and unusual third book, The Weil Conjectures, tells the story of the brilliant Weil siblings—Simone, a philosopher, mystic, and social activist, and André, an influential mathematician—while also recalling the years Olsson spent studying math in college. As she delves into...

    Karen Olsson & Emily Bell In Conversation

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  • 08.02.19
    Narrative Frames
    On Writing

    Narrative Frames

    In Adam Ehrlich Sachs's The Organs of Sense, the year is 1666 and an astronomer makes a prediction shared by no one else in the world: at the stroke of noon on June 30 of that year, a solar eclipse will cast all...

    Adam Ehrlich Sachs & Andrew Martin In Conversation

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  • 05.03.19
    A Woman’s Place
    On Writing

    A Woman’s Place

    What happens when you let your strong female characters step outside their boxes? Writers Katrina Carrasco (The Best Bad Things), Madeline ffitch (Stay and Fight), Tessa Fontaine (The Electric Woman), Chia-Chia Lin (The Unpassing), Ling Ma (Severance), and Lydia...

    Lydia Kiesling, Ling Ma, Katrina Carrasco, Chia-Chia Lin, Tessa Fontaine, and Madeline ffitch In Conversation

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  • 03.22.19
    Saving Yourself from Time
    On Writing

    Saving Yourself from Time

    "David Means is a master of tense, distilled, quintessentially American prose...Each story by Means which I have read is unlike the others, unexpected and an unnerving delight." —Joyce Carol Oates Following the publication of his widely acclaimed, Man Booker-nominated novel Hystopia, David Means now...

    David Means and Tara Westover In Conversation

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  • 02.08.19
    Escaping Structure
    On Writing

    Escaping Structure

    My novel, The Made-Up Man, began with an inside joke. In 2005, when I was twenty-two, I backpacked Europe for a month with my buddy Andrew. We toured cities we’d already heard of, but also decided, just for the hell of it,...

    Joseph Scapellato

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  • 01.11.19
    Structural Options
    On Writing

    Structural Options

    Angie Kim's debut novel Miracle Creek will publish April 2019, and is about an experimental medical treatment device known as the "Miracle Submarine" that mysteriously explodes, killing two people. What follows is a thoroughly contemporary take on the courtroom drama, drawing on the...

    Angie Kim and Lisa Gornick In Conversation

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  • 07.27.18
    How I Came To the Story
    On Writing

    How I Came To the Story

    Write about what captivates. This principle didn’t occur to me until Mysterium was finished, but now I believe in the words wholeheartedly. It was fascination and reverence for the mountains that bore the novel forward. You could say I was taken captive by...

    Susan Froderberg

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  • 06.01.18
    The Superpowers of Akil Kumarasamy
    On Writing

    The Superpowers of Akil Kumarasamy

    A startlingly beautiful debut, Akil Kumarasamy's Half Gods brings together the exiled, the disappeared, the seekers. Following the fractured origins and destinies of two brothers named after demigods from the ancient epic the Mahabharata, we meet a family struggling with the reverberations of...

    Akil Kumarasamy and Sara Novic In Conversation

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  • 06.01.18
    Roth Unbound
    On Writing

    Roth Unbound

    Philip Roth, one of the most renowned writers of our time, passed away last week at the age of 85 in Manhattan. We are extremely honored to have published some of his work. The following is an excerpt from Roth Unbound, Claudia Roth...

    Claudia Roth Pierpont

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  • 05.25.18
    The Tangled Threads of Narrative
    On Writing

    The Tangled Threads of Narrative

    In Mark Sarvas's Memento Park, Matt Santos becomes aware of a painting that he believes was looted from his family in Hungary during the Second World War. To recover the painting, he must repair his strained relationship with his harshly judgmental father,...

    Mark Sarvas and Maud Newton In Conversation

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  • 05.25.18
    Turning a Seagull Into a Woman on a Bike
    On Writing

    Turning a Seagull Into a Woman on a Bike

    What I’m going to tell you has a very simple plot line. It’s like this: someone decides to write a letter. Someone writes the letter. Someone does not send the letter. Someone writes a novel instead, where someone writes a letter they do not...

    Gunnhild Øyehaug On Changing Genre

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  • 08.16.17
    The Process of Not Knowing
    On Writing
    Sam Stephenson and Allan Gurganus In Conversation

    The Process of Not Knowing

    With more than 500 interviews and over twenty years of research, Sam Stephenson presents his newest masterpiece Gene Smith’s Sink—an extraordinary look into the life of W. Eugene Smith, a revolutionary photojournalist who both captured some of history’s most powerful images and chronicled...

    Sam Stephenson and Allan Gurganus In Conversation

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  • 08.10.17
    The Shadow Chamber, The Boarding House, The Grip of It
    On Writing
    Upseedaisy by Roger Ballen

    The Shadow Chamber, The Boarding House, The Grip of It

    The questions of where a story should go can be paralyzing, especially in the beginning, when anything is possible, and especially if you’re not the type of writer to make a plan, which I’m not. To get through this hairy time, I’m likely to...

    Jac Jemc

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  • 07.19.17
    What Fiction Gets Wrong About AI
    On Writing
    What Fiction Gets Wrong about AI

    What Fiction Gets Wrong About AI

    Fiction almost always gets Artificial Intelligence wrong. The AI narratives are generally Frankenstein (“It’s gone rogue!” e.g. Skynet) or Pinocchio (“I just want to be a real boy!” e.g. Commander Data), both of which are a little banal, and neither of which have much...

    Zachary Mason

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  • 07.14.17
    Fulfilling the Form
    On Writing
    Colin Harrison and Sarah Crichton in Conversation

    Fulfilling the Form

    Colin Harrison and I are an unusual team: he has edited me, and I have the joy of editing him. He went first. In 2003, he edited a book I co-wrote with Mariane Pearl called A Mighty Heart, an account of the murder...

    Colin Harrison and Sarah Crichton In Conversation

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