I read The Hypothetical Girl because my friend Elizabeth Cohen wrote it. That’s what you do when a friend writes a book, you buy it and read – it’s like if a friend opened a barbershop, you’d go and get your hair cut. But I was so knocked out by the collection that I wound up emailing Elizabeth after nearly every story, because each is more wonderful than the one before. All the stories are about looking for relationships online, and finding heartache, surprise, betrayal, and – just maybe – love. Elizabeth’s writing is funny, wise, insightful, and memorable. All the things you want fiction to be that it hardly ever is. In the end, I had to ask her more questions, and she was kind enough to answer.
Katherine Heiny: Did you set out to write a collection about Internet dating or did you realize as you went along that that’s where the book was headed? Continue reading →
Lauren Grodstein
Bill: If we could meet anywhere we wanted for a meal and a talk about your book, where would it be?
Lauren: If we could go anywhere to talk about my book, I think we’d go to my grandmother’s kitchen in the Bronx. Now, it’s possible I’m just saying that because it’s Jewish holiday season and I’m feeling nostalgic – my grandparents have been gone for seven years, and I haven’t been to the Bronx in almost as long. But if we were at her house, at her table, she’d keep bringing us food (whether we liked it or not), and it would all be delicious: gefilte fish she’d ground with her own hands, matzah ball soup, jars of canned black olives because she knows I love them. We’d tell her to sit and eat, but she wouldn’t. The food would keep coming: roast chicken or pepper steak or brisket with the kinds of vegetables that have gone all limp and gravy-logged. Kasha. We could talk about my book a little; it’s about Darwin and intelligent design and love and grief. But let’s say you happened to be a Creationist and I happened to be an Atheist and the discussion got heated – that’s when my grandmother would bring out the sweet cheese blintzes. And we’d forget whatever it was that we were arguing about and when we came up for air, we’d agree that there couldn’t be a sweeter place on earth than my grandmother’s table. Continue reading →
Alan Cheuse
Derek Alger: Your most recent novel, Song Of Slaves In The Desert, is a complex one dealing with an especially turbulent time in history.
Alan Cheuse: Slavery is America’s curse, as Faulkner called it. Biology is just a long line of people trudging through time. History is what they did as they trudged, both good and bad, and despite the “family values” document that those political ignoramuses Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum recently signed about the good in slavery that held black families together, there was nothing good in that so-called “peculiar institution”. Slavery wasn’t peculiar among the Greeks and the Romans, but when it became tied to racial theory, as it did in England in the 16th and 17th centuries, its radical cruelty became more apparent. But why should a writer from Jersey become interested in it in a deeply personal way? Continue reading →
Meg Pokrass: So tell us about your new book.
Caroline Leavitt: Is this Tomorrow is the first novel I ever wrote set in the past, the 1950s. It’s set in a time when everything was supposed to be perfect and everyone was supposed to be the same, and it centers around Ava Lark, a Jewish divorcee with a son, at a time when being divorced was a scandal and being Jewish was suspect. None of the neighbors like or trust her, and her boyfriends make them suspicious. But when her son’s best friend vanishes one day, the cops and the neighbors use it as an opportunity to ostracize her further. The novel flashes forward to when Ava’s son Lewis, and the missing boy’s sister Rose are adults who never got over the disappearance. And then the case seems solved–but is it really? Continue reading →
This coming Thursday, January 31, Wesley McNair will launch his new memoir, The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Poetry and Family, at the Portland Public Library in Portland, Maine, always a good venue for writers, now a great one in its new renovation. And a brilliant evening is planned. It wasn’t hard to imagine where Wes and I would sit for our pretend meal–the porch of his camp on Drury Pond in in Temple, Maine, where in fact we sit many a summer’s evening, talking, talking. Wes likes a beer and a whiskey. I just go for the whiskey. Continue reading →
The Nervous Breakdown, a terrific cultural website on writing, books, music, and more, asked me to interview myself, which I dutifully did. The result is predictably ambivalent. You can read it there, or read it here and go there for much more.
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Q: Bill, thanks for sitting to talk.
A: Thank you, Q. Continue reading →
Q. What are you doing here?
This is it! Today is the official Bill and Dave’s celebration of the publication of my first book, STRATEGIES AGAINST EXTINCTION. It’s a collection of eight stories and one novella, written over a period of almost seven years. I’m delighted that this book is now out in the world, and just wanted to take a moment to share the joy and toot my own horn (honk!) and let you all know. I’m sure many of you have lots of questions about this earth-shattering event, so I’ll try to answer as many of them as I can. Continue reading →
Bill Roorbach‘s latest novel, Life Among Giants, comes out in November of this year. In anticipation of the award-winning author’s latest book I wanted to find out more about who he is and what he loves about writing. Continue reading →
John Lane
Recently, Dave introduced me to the work of John Lane, a guy who likes to get out on the water as much as we do. John teaches English and environmental studies at Wofford College, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he also directs the Goodall Center for Environmental Studies. He is the author of over a dozen books, among them Abandoned Quarry: New and Selected Poems, which was the named the SIBA Book of the Year in Poetry in 2011. His latest nonfiction is My Paddle to the Sea, published last year by the University of Georgia Press, which has just released it in paperback. He’s got a new essay collection, too, Begin with Rock, End with Water, just published by Mercer University Press, too late for this interview. Continue reading →
John Bresland
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John Bresland found me on Facebook a few months ago to ask if I’d want to take part in a video project for TriQuarterly Online. Yes, of course. Now he’s completed it, it’s up and running, and you can find it here. But before you do that, let’s ask John a few questions: Continue reading →
