Category: Interviews

Interviews, my reading life

Nerve Damage author Annakeara Stinson’s bed is surrounded by books 

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Nerve Damage author Annakeara Stinson’s bed is surrounded by books 

Annakeara Stinson‘s writing has appeared in Bustle, Brooklyn Magazine, The Inquisitive Eater, IndieWire, Paste, and Marie Claire. Her debut novel, Nerve Damage, has been called “witty, sexy and moving” by PEOPLE. In it, Clarice flees New York for Los Angeles after a terrifying breakup spirals into stalking, harassment, and obsession. But when she believes her ex has resurfaced three years later, her search for the truth sends her into an increasingly unstable psychological spiral where paranoia, trauma, and reality begin to collapse into one another.

We asked Stinson to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

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Interviews, my reading life

Lake Effect author Hillary Behrman has too many book recs to count

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Lake Effect author Hillary Behrman has too many book recs to count

Hillary Berhman‘s debut short story collection, Lake Effect, was selected by Lauren Groff as the winner of the 2024 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. In it, characters move through wild landscapes and emotionally fraught relationships as they struggle with isolation, longing, and the complicated ways people try to care for one another. Spanning settings from Seattle to Istanbul, these stories explore intimacy, family, labor, and dislocation in lives shaped as much by emotional distance as by fierce human connection.

We asked Berhman to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

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Interviews

Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay on Cross-Cultural Tensions in Chitra Demands to Go Home

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Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay on Cross-Cultural Tensions in Chitra Demands to Go Home

Chitra’s mind is in Kolkata, India, where she has a house she lovingly built with her late husband. But her physical body is stuck in a power wheelchair — in an assisted living facility in Columbus, Ohio. Because of this, Chitra is in a terrible mood most days. Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay’s debut novel, Chitra Demands to Go Home (out now from Modern Artist Press), follows the 75-year-old Bengali widow as she navigates her new existence after suffering a stroke. 

Chitra, it seems, will stop at nothing to leave this place she refuses to call home. 

This is a story with many themes: cross-cultural tensions, a mother’s immovable expectations for her adult children, friendship, and late-in-life identity. Readers can also expect plenty of humor thanks to the novel’s cantankerous main character. Mukhopadhyay herself was trained as a scientist and has spent much of her career in science communications. But for her book, she was largely inspired by her personal observations as a third culture kid who has lived in India, Kuwait, and Canada. We spoke with Mukhopadhyay about the demanding and difficult Chitra, humor’s role in this bittersweet, and much more.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarification.

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Interviews, my reading life

Kerri Schlottman, author of Daytime Moon, learned to read from Are You My Mother

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Kerri Schlottman, author of Daytime Moon, learned to read from Are You My Mother

Kerri Schlottman is the author of Daytime Moon and Tell Me One Thing. In Daytime Moon, readers meet Isa, an adrift woman who has a gift of premonition and a knack for tarot.

We asked Schlottman to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

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Interviews, my reading life

Sarah Wang, author of New Skin, wants you to read Carceral Capitalism

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Sarah Wang, author of New Skin, wants you to read Carceral Capitalism

Sarah Wang’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Harper’s Bazaar, n+1, and BOMB, among other publications. Now, her debut novel, New Skin, has hit the shelves at bookstores.

Following a mother and daughter trapped in a toxic cycle of love, resentment, and reinvention, New Skin is a scalding, darkly humorous debut novel about plastic surgery addiction and the false promises of the American Dream. When Linli Feng returns home to care for her estranged mother after another botched procedure, she is pulled into the dangerous world of black-market beauty treatments and exploitative reality television, forcing both women to confront the damage that obsession and survival have inflicted on their lives.

We asked Wang to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

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Interviews

Inside The Outer Country: Davin Malasarn on Immigration, Queerness, Family, and the Limits of Belonging

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Inside The Outer Country: Davin Malasarn on Immigration, Queerness, Family, and the Limits of Belonging

What does it cost a family to cross an ocean — and who pays the price for generations to come? That is the quietly devastating question at the heart of Davin Malasarn’s debut novel The Outer Country.

The story begins in Thailand, where two sisters have their lives irrevocably split when their parents make the agonizing decision to send only one daughter to America — the foreign land the family calls “the outer country.” When the choice defies expectation, a wound opens between the sisters that time and distance only deepens.

Years later, one sister’s young son, Ben, becomes the center of the family’s unspoken tensions. When signs of gender nonconformity surface in him, a fateful decision is made that will cast a long shadow over his childhood — and set in motion a story about inheritance, silence, and the slow, difficult work of self-becoming. As Ben grows, he must navigate his queer identity, fractured family relationships, and the weight of a past that no one wants to name, moving between Thailand and Los Angeles and eventually to Stanford.

The Outer Country is a book about what we inherit, what we survive, and what it takes to finally tell the truth.

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Interviews, my reading life

Mercy Hill author Hannah Thurman wants to read all the Pulitzer fiction winners

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Mercy Hill author Hannah Thurman wants to read all the Pulitzer fiction winners

Set in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Hannah Thurman‘s debut novel, Mercy Hill, follows four sisters growing up on the campus of the underfunded state mental hospital where their strong-willed mother serves as head of psychiatry. Richard Russo says it “will stay with you long after you put the book down.”

Thurman, who is based in Brooklyn, was the winner of the Florida Review’s 2023 Editor’s Prize for Fiction, and her stories have been published in The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Southern Indiana Review, among others. She has been chosen for residencies at Yaddo, Ragdale, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

We asked her to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

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Interviews

Hasan Dudar on the Complexities of the Family-Owned Corner Store in Carryout

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Hasan Dudar on the Complexities of the Family-Owned Corner Store in Carryout

Hasan Dudar’s Carryout is a marrow-deep collection of linked stories rooted in the Arab diaspora, with themes of displacement and identity, as well as threads of melancholy and humor. Out now from the University of Iowa Press, the book follows Ziad Idilbi, a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon, and his wife Salma, a Lebanese refugee who escaped the war in Beirut, as they set roots in Toledo, Ohio. The displaced couple open a carryout, a corner store, from which they carve out a living. They have three children: eldest son Mustafa, only daughter Nawal, and youngest son, Walid — an aspiring poet.

With great lucidity and wit, Dudar brings readers a vivid portrait of immigrants and refugees who have no other choice but to create a new community for themselves in the United States. Carryout is poignant and tender — a mosaic of life experiences and the complex inner monologues of characters who are grappling with the complicated legacy that is displacement. 

I spoke with Dudar about the inspiration behind Carryout, the complexities of the corner store, and major themes embedded in his debut.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarification.

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Interviews

Imani Thompson on Writing Honey, Misogyny, and the Lovable Psychopath

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Imani Thompson on Writing Honey, Misogyny, and the Lovable Psychopath

Imani Thompson’s debut novel, Honey, explores the sticky side of what it means to be a woman in a world full of men that functionally disregards women. Yrsa is fed up and bored with her school life, so she kills. At first, because she can, but essentially, because she feels that ridding the earth of the kind of man that makes it hard for women to live here is important work. Men who hurt her, her friends, and women in general. Thompson’s novel is witty, electric, thrilling, and thought-provoking. She blends themes of misogyny, narcissism, race, and class with ease, while assuring that the reader can still see the softness and humanness of the story’s protagonist, Yrsa.

I spoke with Thompson about writing the terrible thing, what community looks like in the literary world, and the rhythm of language and words.

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