Michael Robbins really hates living in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The poet, whose book Alien vs. Predator was recently released by Penguin, is teaching there until June, and then he’s getting out of dodge. “Hattiesburg smells like a sewer,” he emphatically told me in the middle of our conversation. “You can go online and Google the Hattiesburg smell, it’s an actual thing. I think they actually have wooden water wheels to aerate the sewage. There’s just way too much sewage to properly aerate […]
Conversation: “Cataclysm Baby” Author Matt Bell On Apocalypses, Fairy Tales, And Much More
The first work I read from Matt Bell was a novella called “The Collectors,” a dissection and exploration of the lives of the reclusive Collyer brothers. It sounded an impressive note: stylistically innovative while retaining a moving human core; I was hooked. His surreal and visceral work — much of which can be found in the collection How They Were Found — borrows themes and images from video games and folktales alike. His latest book, the novella Cataclysm Baby, is a series […]
Conversation: Justin Vivian Bond on Kate Bush, Joan Didion, and “Silver Wells”
Justin Vivian Bond is a transgender writer, singer, painter, and activist constantly adding projects to an already lengthy list of accomplishments. Having played Carnegie Hall and Broadway as Kiki DuRane, the more vocal half of beloved punk-lounge act Kiki and Herb, Mx. Bond made the transition to solo work under v’s own name with the 2011 album Dendrophile. V’s next album is called Silver Wells, after the fictional hometown of Joan Didion’s protagonist in Play It As It Lays, and […]
A Darker, Less Comical Dystopia: A Conversation With Miles Klee
I know that I went into 2012 thinking that the year the Mayan calendar ran out was going to be a landmark year for dystopian novels. With that said, I think we should give Miles Klee’s Ivyland (OR Books) the award for “Best Book Where Everything Is Going/Has Gone To Total Shit,” and call it a day. Klee’s debut is a darkly comical (more dark, less comical) book that takes place in a New Jersey where humanity has decayed into nothing. This isn’t […]
Talking Cannibalism, Werewolves, and Hallucinogenic Moss With Nick Antosca
The last time I spoke with Nick Antosca it was to discuss his second novel Midnight Picnic, a surreal and incredibly powerful ghost story that took a storied form and made it feel utterly contemporary. A lot has changed since then: Antosca has left New York City for Los Angeles; he’s joined the writing staff of Teen Wolf; his first novel Fires was reissued by Civil Coping Mechanisms; and he has a new book out. The title novella of The […]
What We Talk About When We Talk To Nathan Englander: An Interview With Nathan Englander
Welcome to the year of Nathan Englander: a new, critically acclaimed book of short stories with the Carveresque title of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (also the title of the first story in which a Ultra-Orthodox couple smoke weed with a secular couple,) a translation of the Haggadah entitled the New American Haggadah, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, and a play based on a story from his first collection, put together in conjunction with the […]
Booze, Bollywood, And Dutch Football: A Conversation With Rosie Schaap
If you talk to Rosie Schaap for less than five minutes, you will realize that she is both an incredibly interesting conversationalist, and somebody with a massive amount of knowledge floating around inside her head. According to her bio, she’s been a bartender, a fortuneteller, a librarian at a paranormal society, an English teacher, an editor, a preacher, a community organizer, a manager of homeless shelters, a ghostwriter for an inspirational magazine, and soon she’ll add another notch to that list when her […]
The Old Programmer’s Habits: A Conversation With Ellen Ullman
Ellen Ullman worked as a programmer for over twenty years and began writing about her experiences in Silicon Valley for Salon and The New York Times just as the dot com bubble was getting too big for its own good. Her essays in Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents form a distinct and fascinating portrait of the beginning of the way we live and breathe technology now. While her first novel The Bug is about a programmer and a software engineer looking […]