"I guess this book is about surviving and what we are born into." New Yorker cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan explains his intentions for his illustrated memoir, I Was a Child, published by Blue Rider Press this month. 

A selection from Jay Baron Nicorvo's debut collection, Deadbeat (Four Way Books, 2012), is paired with an appearance of the book's central character, Deadbeat. Read Nicorvo's "The Art of Reading John Berryman" in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Poet Paul Muldoon muses on how poetry is taught to young people and can be misunderstood. Muldoon's One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

"The one thing we know about Felix, for all his good heart and his good feelings, it isn't always necessary for him to be there to report something." Man Booker Prize winner Peter Carey talks about Felix Moore, the "last socialist journalist in Australia," who is the unreliable narrator of his new novel, Amnesia (Knopf, 2015).

"Is it that bad to write genre?" David Simon, writer and producer of the HBO drama The Wire, speaks with novelist Richard Price about his choice to release his latest book, The Whites (Henry Holt, 2015), under the pseudonym Harry Brandt.

Rick Moody moderates a panel of writers whose work appears in anthologies of noir fiction set in Iran and Israel, both published by Akashic Books in October 2014. Salar Abdoh is the editor of Tehran Noir, and Etgar Keret and Assaf Gavron are the editors of Tel Aviv Noir.

Book critic Ron Charles provides a humorous plot summary of Daniel Handler's new novel, We Are Pirates (Bloomsbury, 2015). You can read Charles's full review of the book in the Washington Post.

“Do what you want to do, and don’t worry if it's a little odd or doesn’t fit the market.” Lydia Davis, whose latest collection of stories, Can't and Won't, was released in paperback by Picador in March, offers practical and reassuring advice for writers.

In a talk at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, Kim Gordon of the band Sonic Youth discusses her memoir Girl in a Band (Dey Street Books, 2015) with Carrie Brownstein of the band Sleater-Kinney. Brownstein's memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, is forthcoming in October from Penguin.

"My father said they should have named me What Have You Done." The opening lines of Jim Shepard's novel The Book of Aron, published by Knopf, are featured in this animated video by Drew Roberts.