Category: Interviews & Excerpts

“Quotation Marks Are for Amateurs”: Matthew Kinlin in Conversation with James Nulick

From the venom-tongued Valencia to the hallucinatory The Moon Down to Earth, James Nulick writes novels about outsiders with the precision of a plastic surgeon and the phantasmagorial style of Marcel Proust reanimated in battery acid. His hypnotic and serpentine prose cumulates and reaches new heights in his latest novel Plastic Soul, a work of…
Adam Camiolo Talks to Celebrated New Zealand/Aotearoan Author Pip Adam

Pip Adam is the celebrated New Zealand/Aotearoan author of four novels, including New Animals (2018), which won the Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction, and her latest, Audition, which was published in the U.S. by Coffee House Press in June. The novel is a profoundly strange but deeply moving exploration of life in the margins of society, the…
“There Is So Much to Unlearn”: An Interview with Wendy C. Ortiz by Jax Connelly

When I was sixteen, I had a fat crush on my boss at the grocery store where I scanned boxes of cereal and punched in produce codes for five dollars an hour. He was twenty-four, a community college dropout with dyed-black hair and a tattoo of a guitar stretching out over the back of his…
Author Annie Hartnett in Conversation with Rachel Reeher

Annie Hartnett is the kind of writer that makes you laugh when you shouldn’t. The kind of writer that, in one moment, has you hoping no one is looking over your shoulder as you crack up over utter tragedy, and, in the next moment, has you welling up over the most perfectly executed joke. Nothing…
Olivia Ivings & Shane Snyder Talk with Poet Erin Carlyle about Grief, Memory, and Poverty in the South

I’ve known Erin Carlyle for twelve years. We shared living spaces for ten of them—first as partners, then as spouses—and in that time we struggled together. Struggled to find a place to settle. A place of stability. A place we could call home. It was a depressingly mundane American story defined by movement, money, and…
“Creatures of Culture and Perpetrators of Civilization”: Jiwon Choi Talks with Editors of Color in the Landscape of Modern Publishing

In 2015, Lee & Low published The Diversity Baseline Survey, giving us a rundown of who’s working in publishing, including small, medium, and large publishers. Their percentages are as follows: 79% White 7% Asian 6% Hispanic 4% Black 1% Middle Eastern 1% Native American These numbers take into consideration jobs across the board, from editorial…
Book Excerpt: Two Poems from What It Was Like to Be a Woman by Melinda Wilson

Melinda Wilson’s heroically tough and vulnerable book, What It Was Like to Be a Woman, relays this very information with grit and beauty. From childhood through to the present, Wilson’s poems illustrate that under patriarchy our bodies are never our own, and the struggle to keep what’s ours ours—mind and body—is one that spans a lifetime.…
Book Excerpt: Three from Tricia Middleton’s Novel-in-Verse Obsidian Situations

What is the obsidian situation? An act of mourning, committed in a mood of cocky abjection, against indifference and hollow repetition. The element is wet: fountains, sweat, vapours, wine, puddles, tears tears tears, soggy towels and the Seine flowing beneath. The form is layered, carefully folded, then crumpled and held together with an ancient ribbon.…
“Spirit Rock”: Matthew Sidney Parsons Talks with Wes Blake about His Book Pineville Trace

Wes Blake lives in Nonesuch, Kentucky, and is the author of Pineville Trace, winner of the Etchings Press Novella Prize. Pineville Trace follows Frank Russet, as he sets off on a quest following a cat named Buffalo. After Frank escapes from a prison in Kentucky, his journey to find meaning in the absence of his…