Interview

Short Stories That Are Sick

Mireille Silcoff on her new fiction collection, inspired by her own epic battle with a rare spinal condition.

The Novel as a Fizzing Bomb in Your Brain

Hazlitt drops in on Nick Harkaway, née Nicholas Cornwell, at his London local. Discussed: his new novel Tigerman, writing as a compressed statement of identity, and the anxieties of paternal influence.

|| Author David Adams Richards
Writing About Ghosts: An Interview With David Adams Richards

The author of Crimes Against My Brother speaks with Craig Davidson about the presence of God in his fiction, working class characters, and not condescending to the religious.

|| Xavier Dolan in Tom at the Farm
Xavier Dolan’s Great Expectations

The Quebecois director talks about his film, Tom at the Farm, how his work is received in America, and why never actually gets around to watching movies.

|| All My Puny Sorrows author Miriam Toews
‘No Wonder People Are Reluctant to Talk About Mental Health’: An Interview With Miriam Toews

Miriam Toews, author of All My Puny Sorrows, discusses fictionalizing her family history, how shame begets art, and creating a community with her writing.

|| Photo via Bartosz Kosiorek
‘We Can Be Vibrating Strings Of Energy’: An Interview with Dr. Eben Alexander

The author of Proof of Heaven explains how a Near-Death Experience made him think differently about consciousness, and why science needs to shed its materialism for a more spiritual approach.

‘The Musicality of the Prose’: An Interview with Ghalib Islam

Ghalib Islam, author of Fire in the Unnameable Country, discusses growing up in Toronto’s Jane and Finch area, the “breathlessness” of his writing, and the resistance he faced when he decided not to venture into a more secure career.

|| Scarlett Johansson in Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin
‘Own Your Own Ambiguity’: An Interview with Jonathan Glazer

The auteur behind Sexy Beast and Birth discusses his new film, Under the Skin, for which he would covertly film encounters between his star, Scarlett Johansson, and unwitting non-actors from the streets of Glasgow.

‘I Do Not Outline’: An Interview With Helen Oyeyemi

The Nigerian-born British author discusses her fifth novel, Boy, Snow, Bird, a reinterpretation of Snow White with an eye towards issues of race and beauty, and tells us what it's like “to mess up all the good fairy tales.”

||Blake Bailey, left, and Scott in 1988. Photo by Marlies Bailey
‘I Felt Nothing’: An Interview with Blake Bailey

The famed biographer of John Cheever and Richard Yates discusses the tenuous bond between him and his self-destructive brother, whose suicide provides the basis of his new memoir, The Splendid Things We Planned.