Interview

|| 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.

How To Run (Away To) The Circus

The author meets an old carny who could have been stripped from the pages of her new novel.

‘Confronting the language of lies’: Masha Gessen on Pussy Riot

The Russian-American journalist talks to Hazlitt about her new book, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, and the perils of resistance in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

‘One Hot Nebbish’: An Interview with Gary Shteyngart

The tragicomic novelist—now memoirist—talks about his father’s harrowing upbringing, the value of asthma, modern threats to reading culture, and what he really thinks of Canadian writers.