I met Tom Lin at the Napa Valley Writer’s Conference this summer, where we spoke about our debut books. His debut novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, about a Chinese orphan raised by a white man to become an assassin in the post-Civil war western United States, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction. Having thoroughly enjoyed our panel and the book itself, I asked him if we might talk—about the book, about the genre of the Western, and also, about the fiction writing process in general.

In Please Be Advised, a work that calls to mind Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End and TV’s The Office, Christine Sneed comically explores office culture in the twenty-first century.