Interviews

Resurrecting Walter Benjamin’s Archival Spirit: An Interview with Frances Cannon

“Work on good prose has three steps: a musical phase when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, & a textile one when it is woven.” These words come from the brain of 20th-century philosopher and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin. But they’ve been reimagined by Vermont-based artist and author Frances Cannon. In […]

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On the “Competing Narratives” of Trust Exercise: An Interview with Susan Choi

One of the most absolutely electric scenes in Susan Choi’s fifth novel Trust Exercise (Henry Holt and Co., 2019) takes place fairly early-on in the book. Sarah and David are sophomores at an elite performing arts high school. They’re fifteen, and the previous summer, they entered into an intense relationship. But after a series of misunderstandings,

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Fueling Up on Rice & Beans & Poetry: An Interview with Janaka Stucky of Black Ocean Press

Black Ocean is an independent publisher based out of Boston, with satellites in Detroit and Chicago. Known for their experimental and bold aesthetic, Black Ocean celebrates artists who color outside the lines & produce risk-taking literature with a purposeful vitality. Since 2004, the press has produced over 50 full-length poetry collections, including titles such as

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“Both a Poem and a Microcosm:” An Interview with Roja Chamankar

Roja Chamankar’s Dying in a Mother Tongue is a poetry collection on the brink of loss, violence, coming into language, adulthood, and emigration. First written in 2009 (in Persian), when Chamankar was about to leave Tehran for France, Dying in a Mother Tongue is first a diegesis of a relationship’s destruction. The poem moves from

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A Lover Alone in Prison: A Conversation between Ilan Stavans and Sara Khalili

Not only what we read in these global times but how depends on a number of forces. Writers, translators, editors, and publishers, consciously and otherwise, respond to these forces, offering a diet that in part responds to their individual taste while also adjusting to the larger laws of the market. In other words, all literary

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Iranian Cinema, Then and Now: An Interview with Blake Atwood and Pedram Partovi

Over the weekend of February 15–17, 2019, a symposium of about a dozen scholars convened at the University of Michigan to talk about the changes and challenges facing the field of Iranian Studies forty years after the Revolution of 1978–79. In addition to art, literature, historiography, and anthropology, the topic of cinema and media studies

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The Wild Birds: A Review and an Interview with Emily Strelow

In her debut novel, The Wild Birds (Rare Bird Books, 2018), author Emily Strelow interrogates what it means to be “wild” by layering the word’s many meanings onto palpable, empathic, and deeply-flawed characters, all who live among the diverse and wondrous environs of the American West.  The Wild Birds is told in alternating, non-linear chapters—an appropriate

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