Interview

||NASA Earth Observatory image of the 2004 tsunami hitting the Sri Lanka coast.
A Better Quality of Agony

Few of us can imagine what it’s like to lose almost your entire family unexpectedly in the space of a breath, and be the one who survives. But that’s what happened to Sonali Deraniyagala when a brutal tsunami struck South Asia in 2004. Deraniyagala, author of Wave, talks to Hazlitt about living with disaster.

||Stephen Reid, courtesy Vancouver Writers Festival
How Being a Writer Means Never Feeling Safe

With a new collection of essays, bank robber, and celebrated author Stephen Reid talks to Hazlitt from his current incarceration about why prisoners write.

Jailbird Bookworms

Hazlitt talks with former prison librarian Avi Steinberg—author of Running the Books—about the necessity of communication, the future of libraries, and helping inmates find their own voice.

||Joanna Akyol
A Musical of Bizarre Needs and Bittersweet Longings

In Do You Want What I Have Got, co-creators Veda Hille and Richardson have a fashioned an unlikely and entertaining bit of musical theatre from snippets of Craigslist classifieds. Hazlitt speaks with Hille and Richardson during the show's current Toronto run.

Battling Bitterness with Boogeymen

George Saunders discusses his new short story collection, Tenth of December, the importance of public artists, and the possibility that fiction makes us better people.

||Lola Landekic
The Plight of the Shopgirl

Retail is a largely female profession, and the shopgirl is an enduring—and typically voiceless—archetype. But Jean Rhys's modernist novel, Good Morning, Midnight, probed the darkness of a shopgirl's inner life; and Green Girl by Kate Zambreno picked up where Rhys left off. We spoke with Zambreno (author, most recently, of Heroines), about retail, Rhys, misery, and more.

||Photo by Joe Burbank
They Know Who You're Voting For

Sasha Issenberg, author of The Victory Lab, talks about the egghead revolution in campaign politics, and explains how interested parties can determine who you're voting for by what car you drive