Jessica Francis Kane in conversation with Alex Shephard What is there to say about a massacre? This is the question that Kurt Vonnegut poses at the beginning of Slaughterhouse Five. It’s also a question that we, as a nation, have been asking ourselves since the tragic shooting in Tucson which left six dead, including a […]
Joanna Smith Rakoff in conversation with Alex Shephard Joanna Smith Rakoff’s 2009 debut A Fortunate Age is one of the best novels about being in your twenties in New York City in recent memory. Perhaps more importantly, the novel, which follows five graduates of my and Rakoff’s alma mater, Oberlin College, is about trying to […]
Super Sad True Love Story – Gary Shteyngart
“Shteyngart is Saul Bellow’s closest relative: the guardian of both the immigrant novel and the American novel, a writer of prose as moving and precise as any currently being written.”
The Year in Review For the next three weeks we’ll be publishing reviews of books published last year and interviews with writers whose work we admire. This isn’t meant to be a “Best of” list or a comprehensive account of the year in literature; instead, we think of these reviews as a kind of narrative […]
Daniel Radosh in conversation with Alex Shephard While visiting his wife’s family in Kansas in 2005, Daniel Radosh accompanied his sister-in-law to an evangelical Christian rock festival. At one point, one of his sister-in-law’s friends ran up to him and exclaimed, “That was awesome! They prayed like three times in a 20-minute set!” From that […]