14. That Art Life
Are authors ever as interesting as their books? Usually not. Yet writers today are compelled to promote not just their work but themselves.
13. Inventing an Archive
One of the first things marginalized researchers in the humanities discover is that the choices about who and what materials are important enough to include in archives, and how that material will be presented, actively works to nullify non-whiteness and…
12. Our Bodies, Our Time Machines
I’ve become aware of the fuzziness of my experience of time. Days slide together or drift apart, making the present feel elastic and stretchy. This elasticity—part of getting older and living through a global pandemic—is also the bread and butter…
11. A Good Day at the Old Sweatshop
How can a narrative locked in place register the sprawl of global supply chains?
10. Salome, Your Silence is Too Loud for This Noisy Place
Putuma and Galgut explore the persistent negation of Black subjectivity and how this negation continues to haunt South African public life. What happens when laws change but hearts don’t?
9. Dining in With Chang-rae Lee
“Food is about being human.” There is an undeniable link between food and mood, but isn’t it odd for a literary critic to take an interest in culinary matters?
8. The Proper Name of Theory
What relationship, if any, does the anticolonial novel of ideas bear to the contemporary “theory novel”? Nguyen’s novels expose the tension between the two forms.
7. On Rewriting the World
“Writing is a community practice,” Garza says. “When we write, we write with others. We always write with materials that are not our own.”
6. On Having Something to Say
“I write only when I have something to say” — How should a Caribbean writer of my generation take this? Moreover, Is it a good advice for a teacher to give her writing students?
5. Writing Home
“Home is a place where I exist at every age.”
4. Sigrid Nunez’s Visions of Life
Novels, she says, should provide a “vision of life” rather than a “fascinated horror” of it.
3. Tom Perrotta’s Writerly Ethic
“Who do we, as writers, choose not to leave behind?”
2. Jennifer Egan, Reverberator
“The novel wraps itself around you like a cocoon.”
1. On the Audio Culture of Letters
I think of my favorite literary interviews as revelatory events: occasions, in Toni Morrison’s words, “when some moment or phrase flares like a lightning bug” and all participants “see it at the same time and… remember it the same way”.
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