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"I wanted to write about that moment where everything is at such a high pitch...that you could make one bad decision that could change your life forever." Emma Cline speaks about her debut novel, The Girls (Random House, 2016), which is longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize.
Michael Dickman reads a poem from Brother (Faber & Faber, 2016), a dual-authored collection with his brother Matthew Dickman, which brings together verse written when their older sibling took his own life.
"People always say, is it autobiographical? And the thing is, the whole thing is autobiography, because you're replicating your inner life." At an event at San Francisco State University's Poetry Center, Sarah Schulman shares an anecdote about working for an all-women's trucking company in the seventies, a point of inspiration for her latest novel, The Cosmopolitans (The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2016).
“—my body lights up for life / like all the wishes being granted in a fountain / at the same instant—” Max Ritvo reads his poem “Afternoon” in a short video animated by Nate Milton for WNYC’s Only Human podcast. Ritvo’s debut collection, Four Reincarnations, is forthcoming in November by Milkweed Editions.
Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, best known for his role in the legendary rap group Run-DMC, speaks about growing up in Hollis, Queens and what led him to depression. McDaniels's memoir, Ten Ways Not to Commit Suicide (Amistad, 2016), details his struggles with fame and addiction, and his recovery.
“High school changed my life. Suddenly, there was Latin and German, and Silas Marner and The Odyssey.” Cynthia Ozick talks about her childhood, family influences, and the inspiration behind her book, The Shawl (Knopf, 1989). Ozick’s new nonfiction book, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"The difficulty was that different people liked different parts of the book." In the Paris Review's "My First Time" video series, Helen DeWitt talks about the many challenges she faced before the publication of her first novel, The Last Samurai, which was rereleased by New Directions in May 2016.
"I kind of always assume that you don't write the poem you want to write...that's actually quite freeing because it means you discover something in the act of composition that you didn't know in advance." Ben Lerner talks about his first poetry collection, The Lichtenberg Figures (Copper Canyon Press, 2004), for the Paris Review's "My First Time" video series. Lerner's first nonfiction book, The Hatred of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"It is a plea for the idea that fiction is a way to access or try to access the truth, not a way to escape from it." Alejandro Zambra, recipient of the 2013 Prince Claus Award, speaks about his novel Ways of Going Home (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) and on what writing means to him. Zambra is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine and in our original podcast reading from his latest novel, Multiple Choice (Penguin Books, 2016), translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.
"One thing that I had always wanted for this book was that by the time you got to the end of it, you couldn't say that you didn't understand why black people in America are the way they are, or why they might feel the things that they feel—you get to see exactly what steps have led to the current state of racial tension in America." Read more about Yaa Gyasi in "First Fiction 2016" in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine and hear her read from her debut novel, Homegoing (Knopf, 2016), on Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast.
