Over the past few years, Joshua Cohen has steadily amassed a staggeringly impressive body of work. His criticism appeared in Harper’s; Four New Messages, his collection of novellas, earned rave reviews for its deft prose and bravura displays of nested storytelling, and his novel Witz was both dense and dreamlike, evoking centuries-old imagery and New Jersey rest stops in equal measure. All of which begs the question of what’s next for Cohen — one that I sought to answer via this interview.
Talking Travel Chapbooks and a Sense of Place With Courtney Maum, Aaron Gilbreath, and Bart Schaneman
In the past few months, I’ve had the good fortune to encounter several compelling stories of travel, each of which happened to be released in the form of a chapbook. Specifically, Courtney Maum’s Notes From Mexico, Bart Schaneman’s Trans-Siberian, and Aaron Gilbreath’s A Secondary Landscape (about a road trip down the West Coast) all impressed me greatly — which is how I came to reach out to all three writers about discussing chapbooks, narratives of exploration, and much more.
Answering Questions With Quotes: An Interview With Benjamin Lytal
“Thanks Josh. Let me know if you want me to write a quick intro, to explain that these are quotes. I don’t want to come off as too arch. Cheers.” That message is from Benjamin Lytal, just a few weeks ago in response to some questions I sent him for this website. He apparently didn’t want to answer the questions directly; that’s fine — I don’t think anything below was too groundbreaking and may border on trite in some places, […]
About Your Misogynistic Art: An Interview With Judy Berman and Niina Pollari, Editors of It’s Complicated
The zine It’s Complicated abounds with sharp observations and keen writing about popular culture. The thematic umbrella: feminist responses to misogynistic art. As the first issue shows, that can be work made by anyone from Eminem to Charles Bukowski; the essays examining the works in question are smart, funny, and often revealing. The essays from said issue include Elisabeth Donnelly’s smart reading of the Afghan Whigs’ body of work, with a particular emphasis on Gentlemen, as well as Tom Ribitzky’s discussion of the nascent homoeroticism […]
GChats From Crappalachia: An Interview With Scott McClanahan
A no-bullshit gentleman, Scott McClanahan isn’t afraid to reveal the underbellies of the world, no matter how embarrassing or dirty or stinky or clammy. McClanahan reminds us that it’s essential to take risks. He helps us keep in mind that the human heart can benefit from being scuffled with. He assures us that fear is part of what makes the world go round. His stories grab ahold of us and linger gauzy and ghostlike. But there is no slight of […]
Fragmented Memories and Revising Badminton: A Conversation with Geneviève Castrée
The work of Geneviève Castrée encompasses art, music, and comics, all of which share a common defiance of tradition. It’s idiosyncratic and deeply compelling, no matter the media where one encounters it. Most recently, she is the author of the autobiographical graphic novel Susceptible, which follows its protagonist Goglu through her childhood. That experience is a more hazardous one than it seems: her mother loses herself in intoxication and a neverending bad relationship. Throughout, there are glimmers of hope: Goglu’s discovery of punk […]
Wave Pools, Escapism, and The Creation of “Fight Song”: An Interview With Joshua Mohr
Sometimes it seems like there’s a breed of writer that the current literary world just doesn’t engender anymore. The kind of writer I’m referring to is the type that many of us clung to when we began channeling aspirations that we ourselves could one day be writers. For those of us that didn’t grow up loving books from the start — those of us who, in school, only sunk our teeth into the Orwells or the Huxleys or the writers […]
Notes on Identity, Location, and the Undefinable: A Between Books Interview With Emily St. John Mandel
Emily St. John Mandel specializes in atmospheric, ethically-charged fiction. Her novels — Last Night in Montreal, The Singer’s Gun, and The Lola Quartet — situate themselves around characters seeking redemption. Some are running from ambiguous family histories; others seek to rectify past mistakes. These are taut narratives that abound with precise evocations of place — whether it’s an economically ruined Florida suburb or the more familiar streets of New York. All of these qualities came up in this interview, which we conducted via […]