Books
In Conversation
SALMAN RUSHDIE with John Domini
Towards the end of Salman Rushdie’s new Quichotte, we get the précis. We hear it from the author, but crucially, that’s not our author. The busy Manhattanite of 72, former PEN President, Booker Prize winner and more, the fatwa survivor who recently delivered a droll cameo on HBO.
Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror
By Christine MiJia Tolentino doesn’t seem to write essays so much as drop them, like hit albums, or bombs.
Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger
By Deena ElGenaidiIn today’s political climate, people, particularly women, are angry—and rightfully so. Burn It Down, the forthcoming anthology of essays edited by Lilly Dancyger, features 22 writers who explore what it means to be angry and the reasons for their anger as women today.
Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys
By Joseph PeschelWhitehead’s newest novel The Nickel Boys, is a realistic depiction of another era in African-American history: the post Jim Crow era in Florida, and it’s set primarily in the 1960s and 1970s.
Leland Cheuk's No Good Very Bad Asian
By Kurt BaumeisterLeland Cheuk does an admirable job in his latest, No Good Very Bad Asian, achieving a true synthesis of heart and humor highlighted by the fluidity of his first-person voice and a steady diet of sharp turns of prose.
In Conversation
JIA TOLENTINO with Eric Farwell
I first read Jia Tolentino’s funny, razor-smart work in 2015, when her incredibly thoughtful piece on the work of Canadian pop mystic Carly Rae Jepson ran on The Awl.
Eternal Poet
By devorah majorBob Kaufman is a poet; Bob Kaufman is a man steeped in a mythology sprinkled with a few facts.
In Conversation
KIMBERLY J. SOENEN with Kathleen Rooney
Are we healthy? Writer, educator, and curator Kimberly J. Soenen wants to hear your answers, and to get you to listen to the answers of other people. To facilitate this exchange and to humanize the healthcare debate, she has organized the ambitious and interdisciplinary group show “SOME PEOPLE” (Every)body, which will open at the Bridgeport Art Center in Chicago on October 18, 2019.
In Conversation
JOSHUA SPERLING with Sebastiaan Faber
When John Berger died, on January 2, 2017, the world lost one of its most beloved and singular voices just when it could least afford to. Almost two years later, Joshua Sperling has published A Writer of Our Time, the first book to take full stock of Berger’s lifelong contribution and development.
Edwidge Danticat’s Everything Inside: Stories
By Yvonne C. GarrettDanticat’s writing is language stripped bare which lets her stories and characters breathe. There is a rising intensity in these stories from the first sentence of the first page that draws the reader in and demands we pay attention.
T.C. Boyle's Outside Looking In
By Joseph PeschelFew living, serious novelists know more about magic mushrooms and LSD-25 than T. Coraghessan Boyle. The author of Drop City (2005) and a trove of other fiction even looks the part.
Karen Russell's Orange World and Other Stories
By Joseph PeschelWith her third story collection, Orange World, Karen Russell continues to create a fictive world where fantasy, horror, humor, science-fiction, and realism co-exist.
Philippe Petit's On the High Wire
By Zach DavidsonPhilippe Petit’s On the High Wire (New Directions) is a slim handbook that is divided into twenty-four sections, ranging from “The Quest for Immobility” to “The High Wire Walker’s Salute” to “The King Poles” and, lastly, to “Fear.” Petit’s writing is frequently as nimble and as playful, as surprising and as unflinching, as his feats on the wire.
