Category: Interviews

Interviews, my reading life

Abdelrahman ElGendy Learned to Love Reading Through Mickey Mouse

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Abdelrahman ElGendy Learned to Love Reading Through Mickey Mouse

Abdelrahman ElGendy is an author and translator from Cairo whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Nation, Guernica, and more. A winner of the Samir Kassir Press Freedom Award, he spent six years as a political prisoner in Egypt after being arrested alongside his father at a protest when he was seventeen.

In his debut memoir, ElGendy recounts those years of incarceration and the refuge he found in reading and writing. Moving beyond the conventions of a prison memoir, Huna explores family, friendship, language, resistance, and what it means to remain when hope itself may not be enough.

ElGendy answered the recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped his life and influenced his book.

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Interviews, my reading life

Afsheen Farhadi on Mixed-Genre Novels That Inspire Him

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Afsheen Farhadi on Mixed-Genre Novels That Inspire Him

In False Prophet, Afsheen Farhadi explores what happens when grief, ambition, and storytelling can’t be separated. The novel follows actor Jal Persad, who, after his mother’s death, begins writing a memoir that places her at the center of Jim Jones’s rise in Guyana. The problem: almost none of it is true. As Jal’s fabricated story gains attention, Farhadi examines the stories we tell about ourselves and our families, and what can be lost when those stories become more useful than the truth.

We asked Farhadi to answer our My Reading Life Q&A so readers could learn about the books that shaped his life and influenced his writing.

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Interviews, my reading life

Kate Riley is reading a fat stack of Susan Orleans

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Kate Riley is reading a fat stack of Susan Orleans

Kate Riley’s debut book, Ruth, is about Ruth.

Ruth grows up in an insular Christian communist community where private property is forbidden, daily routines are acts of prayer, and questioning the world around her is discouraged. Told in glimpses across her childhood, marriage, and motherhood, the novel follows Ruth as her persistent curiosity collides with a life built on faith, conformity, and holy mystery, asking what it truly means to be happy and to live a meaningful life.

It was one of the titles I wish I’d gotten around to reading last year, but missed. Now, her debut is out in paperback, so we caught up with Riley so she could answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A.

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Interviews, my reading life

Luke Larkin Thinks You Should Read Octavia Butler Early and Often

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Luke Larkin’s The Unheld is a horror Western set in the haunted Montana Territory, where twelve-year-old Charlie sets out to rescue her father after a nightmarish creature drags him into the wilderness. Joined by an Englishman connected to a mysterious occult society and a Northern Cheyenne policeman living in exile, Charlie ventures into a landscape populated by strange creatures and supernatural threats. Blending Western grit with horror, The Unheld explores loneliness, alienation, and the complicated bonds that hold people together.

Larkin is a queer writer living in Big Sky Country, where he received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana. The Unheld is his debut novel.

Larkin answered our My Reading Life Q&A about the books and writers that have shaped him as a reader and writer.

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Interviews, my reading life

Nita Noveno Finds Freedom in Breaking Form

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Nita Noveno Finds Freedom in Breaking Form

Nita Noveno’s Mud on the Moon is a hybrid memoir that explores the obscured past of her Filipino immigrant father, who arrived in the United States in 1928. Alternating between Noveno’s own coming-of-age story and imagined chapters from her father’s life, the book fills the gaps between what was known, remembered and left unsaid. Blending personal and historical narratives, Mud on the Moon considers how family, memory and identity are shaped by the stories passed between generations.

Noveno teaches composition and literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and is the founder and host emeritus of the New York City reading series Sunday Salon. Her work has appeared in Mãnoa, Identity Theory, Brink, Hippocampus, The Hunger, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Open City and The Margins, and elsewhere.

For My Reading Life, Noveno spoke with Debutiful about the books and writers that have shaped her as a reader and writer.

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Interviews, my reading life

Drew Buxton Reads for Voice, Craft and the Swerve

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Drew Buxton Reads for Voice, Craft and the Swerve

Drew Buxton’s Daytona Teddy Riggs follows Teddy “Daytona” Riggs, a former high school football star in 1996 Corpus Christi who is determined to win the World’s Strongest Man competition. Cast out from his oil-rich family and devoted to the teachings of a self-help guru, Teddy’s obsessive pursuit of strength begins to unravel when a relationship with a local bodybuilder forces him to confront the insecurities beneath the muscle. Buxton’s debut novel blends outrageous comedy and satire with an exploration of masculinity, privilege, mental illness and obsession.

Buxton is the author of the story collection So Much Heart, winner of the Texas Institute of Letters’ Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction. His work has appeared in Southwest Review, Joyland, Vice, and elsewhere.

For My Reading Life, Buxton spoke with Debutiful about the books and writers that have shaped him as a reader and writer.

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Interviews

Friendship, Betrayal, and Enmeshment: Ekin Oklap on Her Dreamlike Summer Debut

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Friendship, Betrayal, and Enmeshment: Ekin Oklap on Her Dreamlike Summer Debut

First Summer by Ekin Oklap is a tender, atmospheric coming of age that starts with a simple premise: a new girl moves in across the street, completely upending the narrator’s life. 

Clara and the narrator melt towards each other during a frizzling summer heat wave, eating ice cream several times a day and dozing under the shade of the trees; dangling their feet in the creek and riding their bikes to the local pool. 

The narrator is rescued from herself, entirely transported and transformed by Clara’s attentions, until the summer comes to an end and Clara is gone, her brief visitation over as quickly as it began. 

I had the opportunity to speak with Ekin Oklap about her writing process, teenage friendship and loneliness, and how her work as a translator helped her write her debut. The conversation below has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Continue reading “Friendship, Betrayal, and Enmeshment: Ekin Oklap on Her Dreamlike Summer Debut” →
Interviews, my reading life

The Books That Taught K.W. Oxnard to Embrace the Dark and Strange

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The Books That Taught K.W. Oxnard to Embrace the Dark and Strange

K.W. Oxnard’s The Leg in Question is a collection of fifteen stories exploring the strange, unsettling, and often darkly funny ways our bodies can betray us. Moving from post-World War I New York to pandemic-era Savannah, from Maine to Malaysia, the collection brings doctors and patients together at the uneasy intersection of medicine, mortality, obsession and desire.

Oxnard’s fiction has appeared in Story, Columbia Journal Online, Tahoma Literary Review and elsewhere. Her story “Belle of the Ball” won the 2024 Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Contest, and her work has been recognized by the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, CRAFT Flash Fiction Contest and other awards.

For My Reading Life, Oxnard spoke with Debutiful about the books and writers that have shaped her as a reader and writer.

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Interviews

Murder, Bougie Dogs, and Reality TV Collide in Mimi Montgomery’s Murder Bites

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Murder, Bougie Dogs, and Reality TV Collide in Mimi Montgomery’s Murder Bites

Murder Bites, Mimi Montgomery’s debut novel, is a satire of reality TV, millennial dog culture, and 2020s politics, yet what is surprising is its earnestness. Underneath the surface is a novel about people’s capacity to change and a story relatable to anyone who ever felt like they didn’t belong. In this conversation, Mimi and I talked about character arcs, Carl Hiaasen, and, of course, DMX. 

Continue reading “Murder, Bougie Dogs, and Reality TV Collide in Mimi Montgomery’s Murder Bites” →