Interview: Amy Sackville Author of Orkney
A literature professor honeymoons with his much younger bride on the Orkney Islands in this beautifully rendered tale of love and obsession. If you have yet to read Amy Sackville, prepare to be entranced. Shelf Unbound: Like your debut novel The Still Point, which was long-listed for the Orange Prize, Orkney is very much a novel […]
Interview: Michael Kimball Author of Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard)
Mud Luscious Presshttp://www.mudlusciouspress.com From #45 Adam Robinson, who once “hid out all night in a porta potty at an amusement park because some bands he really wanted to see were playing the next day” and later became a poet (Adam Robinson and Other Poems and Say Poem) to #307 Soap, who “was amazed at all […]
Interview: Scott McClanahan Author of Crapalachia: A Biography of Place
Shelf Unbound: Your fiction reads like nonfiction. Your nonfiction reads like fiction. Both read like truth. Do you give any thought to these labels when you are writing? Scott McClanahan: Hardly ever. I’m usually thinking more about stuff like this: There is a storm out at sea. A sailor asks the captain of the ship. “Captain, how often […]
Interview: Jennifer Bresnick Author of The Last Death of Tev Chrisini
Shelf Unbound: How did you come up with the idea for this novel? Jennifer Bresnick: It started out as an act of desperation five minutes after midnight on November 1, 2009. I had finally worked up the courage to participate in my very first National Novel Writing Month, but I was completely stuck for ideas. […]
Interview: Eduardo Halfon Author of The Polish Boxer
Shelf Unbound: You wrote the short story “The Polish Boxer,” about your grandfather surviving Auschwitz, as a stand-alone piece and then developed a novel around the story. The novel centers on a Guatemalan literature professor named Eduardo Halfon. What drew you to the idea of a metafictive narrative? Eduardo Halfon: Before I knew what I […]
Interview: Adam Levin Author of Hot Pink
Shelf Unbound:Your award-winning debut novel The Instructions weighed in a 1,030 pages; Hot Pink is a collection of 10 short stories. Which is more challenging—developing and sustaining a long story or encapsulating a short one? Adam Levin: It’s a tie. I’m desperately afraid of boredom, so whenever I sit down to write fiction, I attempt the most challenging thing […]
Interview: Elissa Schappell Author of Blueprints for Building Better Girls
Shelf Unbound:As the writer of the “Hot Type” book column for Vanity Fair, cofounder of Tin House magazine, and former senior editor of The Paris Review, you’ve probably read as much contemporary fiction as anyone. So with Blueprints for Building Better Girls, was there a particular literary territory you wanted to stake out as your […]
Interview: Kevin Powers Author of The Yellow Birds
Shelf Unbound:The Yellow Birds succeeds as both an evocative, poetic novel and a high-impact documentary of the horrors of war. Were these aspects equally important to you? Kevin Powers: Yes. And I would even say that I found it impossible to separate the two. I chose to emphasize the language as a way of highlighting […]
Interview: Matt Bell Author of Cataclysm Baby
Shelf Unbound:You’ve written 26 small tales of the grim and grotesque, with grossly malformed babies and shockingly evil children. How did you come to this subject matter and to the idea of cataclysm? Matt Bell: The apocalyptic mood has been a strong part of my reading and writing for a long time, and I’ve definitely […]
Interview: Kathleen Winter Author of Annabel
Shelf Unbound: Annabel, your first novel, was a best-seller in Canada and a finalist for the Giller prize. It won the GLBTQ Indie Lit Award and has just been named a finalist for Amazon.ca’s First Novel Award. Annabel is the story of an intersex baby born in Labrador in 1968. How did the idea for […]