Two Continents Back to Back
In a world that so often pushes for monochromatic, binary categorization, Charlotte Williams’ memoir, Sugar and Slate, asks...
Interviews
Instead of a Plaque in the Sidewalk, How About the Building Next to It?
For more than fifty years, Miss Major has played the crucial role of surrogate mother and grandmother to...
‘The book is inflected by a general sense of apprehension that we all have at present – an awareness of the possibility of world-ending events.’
The first thing you’ll need to know about Missouri Williams’ The Doloriad is that an environmental disaster has...
Toni Morrison on Angela Davis and Angela Davis on Toni Morrison
In the summer of 2014, author Dan White spoke separately to Toni Morrison and to Angela Davis about...
‘Shorter is expected to be less substantial. It feels arbitrary— why would length be correlated with impact?’
Natasha Brown’s Assembly is a concise, fragmentary novel that runs to 100 pages. Within these tight constraints she...
‘It’s best to understand the rules before you break them’
When people think of Indigenous art from the Pacific Northwest, it’s usually going to be something called formline, a technique that uses ovoid shapes, high contrast, and positive and negative space.
A kind of letting go
I’m very taken with the subjunctive in all things historical. What are the other possibilities and tributaries that branch off from what happened?
‘Modern medicine is brilliant. But we’re not good at keeping people from falling off the cliff in the first place.’
Why is it that we, as a society, don’t pay more attention to stories of recovery? Why do...
‘One of the challenges of the book was how is it possible to write about whiteness? To make it apparent, to show it, make it show itself’
In Sarah Elaine Smith’s new novel, Marilou is Everywhere, a young woman from Deep Valley, Pennsylvania, goes missing. Jude Vanderjohn...
‘We have an expectation that loss comes all at once.’
Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar is a love story: a tale of obsession and betrayal. But not between lovers:...
‘Another thing that fascinates me: one sentence can reveal so much about a person.’
This month I read Lydia Davis’s latest, Essays, before our arranged phone conversation. Davis’s writing voice is always...