Interviews & Reviews

Getting Even, Letting Go: an Interview with Julian Tepper by Svetlana Satchkova

October 29, 2026

Julian Tepper’s fifth novel, Getting Even, Letting Go (Rare Bird, 2026), takes place over a single day in New York. We experience it with Gene Mills, a broke writer whose ex-wife has become a famous painter. Years after their marriage ended, Gene still has some forty paintings his ex-wife left behind. Among them are two portraits of a man she had an affair with while they were together. In need of money and still nursing the wounds of the marriage, he decides to sell the portraits at auction, hoping both for a financial windfall and, perhaps, a way of finally

Bradley Sides Recommends: Nine Collections that Capture Rural Settings in their Simple Beauty

October 27, 2026

Oftentimes, as a kid in rural Alabama, I fell asleep with my window open. I could hear a mix of cows mooing, frogs croaking, and creeks flowing. It was the best sound machine I’ve ever had. The days were just as pleasant. I swam in ponds, gave show cows baths, and hung out with my grandfather in his expansive garden. Each day was brimming with the natural beauty of the rural world. In my debut novella, The Volcano Keeper (Regal House, 2026), I plant my characters in a fictionalized rural Alabama community that is similar to the one I’m from.

Ted McLoof Recommends: Nicholas Montemarano’s “If the Sky Falls” and Anna Dickson James’ “Boys Buy Me Drinks to Watch me Fall Down”

June 9, 2026

Nicholas Montemarano, If the Sky Falls (Yellow Shoe Fiction, 2005) I was 24 years old when I first encountered Nicholas Montemarano. He was reading for a class I was TAing for, so I dutifully picked up his then-latest book, If the Sky Falls, a collection of short stories. You have to understand that this kind of thing happens a lot: reading the books of visiting writers is part and parcel of academia, and unfortunately the books are often at best easy to get through and at worst a chore. I was as a result not only pleasantly surprised but gobsmacked

This Is Where You Are: Anna Vilner Interviews Nicholas Claro

May 27, 2026

Catastrophe—often in the form of an accident, illness, or injury—is either witnessed or implied throughout the stories of Nicholas Claro’s debut collection, This Is Where You Are (Roadside Press, 2025). His characters tend to sound even keel, despite it all. Claro’s dialogue, in its spare and restrained expressions, strikes a delicate balance that reveals how traumatic events ripple through our daily conversations and actions. Instead of slipping into melodrama, his characters seem to wonder what they are supposed to say to each other in the wake of grief or violence, what they are supposed to eat. I found myself lingering

Brendan Gillen Recommends: Songs for the In-Between

May 19, 2026

I can’t listen to music while I write. Even as I sit here writing about the music that either inspired, or is directly referenced in the stories that make up Hang Time, my new collection out now via .406 Press, the only sounds I hear are the gurgle of my own stomach, the scratch of pencil on paper, and the hurl and rush of afternoon traffic on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway outside my window. I’ve DJ’d and collected records for over twenty-five years. I still read Pitchfork every morning, for better or worse. I’m always on the hunt for sounds—new,

Chatting with the Meat Puppeteer: Ben Gross interviews Hannah Smart

May 12, 2026

Hannah Smart’s debut novel Meat Puppets (Apocalypse Confidential, 2026) is a metafictional romp through the lives of people who know they want more without being entirely sure of what they want more of. Weaving her way through drug-use, acting seminars, and a celebrity-based stock exchange where people can put up real money in the hopes of cashing in on the soon-to-be-famous (or-not), Smart crafts characters whose lack of self-transparency makes them as relatable as they are complicated, as charming as they are repulsive, and as touching as they are fantastic—then she puts them through the wringer. Like all great works of experimental fiction, Meat Puppets’ formal fireworks

Author on Author: Cairo Smith and David Polonoff – Part Two

May 6, 2026

Part Two: Cairo’s Questions to David about Wannabeat (Trouser Press Books, 2024). Click here for Part One. The Novel Within the Novel Cairo Smith: Your hero, Philip, spends much of WannaBeat working on (or avoiding working on) his book, which seems like a deliberate parallel to your own project. It features thinly veiled versions of the people around him (Sally Sassafras for Wendy, Heine for himself), an elaborate Gold Rush allegory, and eventually the arrival of El Nihilismo to destroy everything he’s built. Is the novel-within-the-novel a parody of WannaBeat itself, or a record of an earlier failed attempt,

Author on Author: Cairo Smith and David Polonoff – Part One

May 5, 2026

Part One – David’s Questions to Cairo about Scenebux (New Ritual Press, 2025). Part Two will publish tomorrow. Is Scenebux a Kind of IRL Cyberpunk? David Polonoff: Many of your readers (myself included) have noted the parallels between Scenebux and the work of William Gibson in its fluid mixture of hard-boiled detective/thriller narrative and post-human technology. You’ve quoted ARX-Han on the difficulty of “writing cyberpunk now, because real-life just is cyberpunk.” To what degree is that true? Is it like reading Jules Verne in the 20th century and marveling at the inventions and gadgets he foresaw or more that the cyborgian

Art, Oxy, & L.A.: An Interview With Luke Goebel By Kevin Maloney

April 23, 2026

Luke Goebel is a unicorn in the literary world: an outlaw writer with an underground classic in the indie lit community (Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, 2014) who has also collaborated on screenplays for two major Hollywood films, Causeway and Eileen, cowritten with Ottessa Moshfegh (the two married in 2018). His new novel, Kill Dick, seeks to bridge these worlds, bringing all of the fire, guts, and intelligence of an experimental indie to a page-turning sunshine noir thriller that feels ready for the big screen (and is in the works). The result is an imminently readable crime novel

Richard Cabut Recommends: Constructed Situations and Torn Surfaces

April 21, 2026

We launched my current book Ripped Backsides: Postcards from Beneath the Pavement at Flux Lumina, an arts loft both luminous and dark, as well as fab, on the Bowery in NYC last summer. As is the custom, I made a short introduction to the book, treating the cross section of subway-annotated-novel types, tote-bag literati, bookstore-event lurkers, Downtown creatives – no ironic moustache wearers to be seen unfortunately, but you can’t have everything – in other words a lovely crowd; my kind of people. Ripped Backsides is a personal post-punk drift tracing ruined maps of the noir cities… A fragmentary situationist