Interviews
A Conversation with ‘Best Debut Short Stories 2021’ Author Alberto Reyes Morgan
“Every story has a shape, you just have to figure out what it is and then let it be that shape, man.”
“Mainstream US literary culture is hostile to different ways of writing”: A Conversation with Aruni Kashyap
“I am inspired by other bilingual writers, other writers from smaller—I mean in size, not richness and depth—literary spaces.”
A Conversation with ‘Best Debut Short Stories 2021’ Author Khaddafina Mbabazi
“I come from a culture that deifies the established and gatekeeps everything on their behalf. So it makes me glad that there are in fact spaces in the world where professional youth is celebrated.”
A Conversation with ‘Best Debut Short Stories 2021’ Author Qianze Zhang
“Maybe being in a disorganized, overstimulated state of mind helped me evoke the anxiety of being on the internet while undergoing a process of ruthless self-evaluation.”
“If you don’t tell the story someone else might, and they’ll change the facts”: José Vadi and Mensah Demary in Conversation
José Vadi’s work for Catapult magazine was unlike anything I’d encountered before. His essays are embodied and imbued with musicality, experimentation, play, and risk. After editing and publishing his essay “Getting to Suzy’s,” an on-the-ground examination of life in San Francisco amid rampant gentrification, I invited José to submit more work. And after publishing two […]
A Conversation with ‘Best Debut Short Stories 2021’ Author Stanley Patrick Stocker
“Good things happen when you keep at it.”
“Through writing this book, I’ve come to decide that I’m no longer a foreigner in this land”: A Conversation with Ye Chun
“Although my main characters find themselves in difficult circumstances, they are not passive. They resist, confront, and sometimes arrive at moments of transcendence.”
What We’ll Remember: An Interview with Debut Author Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry
“My stories often start with a feeling that unspools somewhere deep inside.”
“My sensibility as a writer is to give space for introspection”: A Conversation with Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
“The boundaries of my identity shift depending on which language I speak and operate in.”
A Conversation with ‘Best Debut Short Stories 2021’ Author Mackenzie McGee
“Speculative fiction at its best is outlandish at first glance, but ends up feeling immediate. That challenge is often what gets me writing—I want to take an absurd premise and see how deep it can go.”