Books

'Empathy Implicates You': An Interview with Bill Hader

On Jeffrey Dahmer, classics professors, soccer hooligans and comic books. 

Set it on Fire and Start Over: Courting Failure with Idra Novey

Speaking with the author of Ways to Disappear about embracing impulsiveness, the common ground between writing and translating, and the purifying power of flames.

Secrets Among Distractions: The Power of Wimmelbooks

The suspended crowds depicted in these "teeming pictures" provide the opportunity to explore overwhelming chaos. 

'A Society That Can’t Speak is Like a Body That Doesn’t Feel Pain': An Interview with Anjan Sundaram

Speaking with the author of Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship, about violence and repression in Kagame-led Rwanda and the dark side of supposed symbols of progress.

The 10,000 Year Clock

Somewhere out in Texas, a group is building a machine to challenge the human perception of time. 

Saul Bellow's Last Interview
Saul Bellow's Last Interview

The story behind the last known interview with the author of Herzog, Ravelstein, and The Adventures of Augie March, with exclusive video.

The Worthy Elephant: On Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

For the fiftieth anniversary of the book's publication, a discussion of craft, veracity and the literary appeal of true crime. 

Virginia Woolf's Philosopher of Novelty

Mrs. Dalloway and the promise and problems of empathy.

'The Intense Erotica of the Propulsion of a Sentence': An Interview with Garth Greenwell

Talking with the author of What Belongs to You about the stimulating power of language, the falseness of authenticity, and how important it is to be an idiot.

The Things You Purge and the Things That Stay: In Conversation with Brett Fletcher Lauer

"I think about the future only in the sense of dying. I don’t even mean it to be bleak—that’s just how I think of it. Anything I write comes out that way."