“I believe that the best books aren’t those that entertain us. The best books are those that hurt us.” In this 2018 interview at the Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark, Italian writer Domenico Starnone talks about the pleasure and exhaustion of writing and refers to a letter Kafka wrote about the importance of writing books “that are like an axe that breaks the frozen chest.” Starnone’s novel Trust (Europa Editions, 2021), translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri, is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.