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 […]
Interview: Erika Dreifus Author of Quiet Americans
Shelf Unbound talks with Erika Dreifus about her new book of short stories, Quiet Americans, published by Last Light Studio (www.lastlightstudio.com). Shelf Unbound: The stories in Quiet Americans look at the impact of the Holocaust on generation after generation, starting in prewar Berlin and moving through time and family up to the present day. What […]
Interview: Edwidge Danticat Author of Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work
Shelf Unbound: You’ve subtitled your book “the immigrant artist at work.” Is being an immigrant equal in weight to being an artist in terms of how you think of yourself? Edwidge Danticat: There are so many ways that I think of myself: as woman, mother, writer. Being an immigrant and being a writer is in […]
Interview: Karen Tei Yamashita Author of I Hotel
Shelf Unbound: You take a chapter in Asian American history and break it down into its human elements and stories. Which came first for you in writing the novel—the larger historical structure or the individual concerns and dramas of the participants? Karen Tei Yamashita: The process of researching and writing were probably more organic and […]
Interview: Grace Krilanovich Author of The Orange Eats Creeps
http://www.twodollarradio.com Shelf Unbound: The OrangeEats Creeps is a relentless existentialist nightmare told from the point of view of a nameless female hobo vampire junkie. I’ll pull out the key word here: existentialist. Is that the main thing you were going for? Grace Krilanovich: Yes, well, a lot’s at stake here and the dread, the leakage, […]
Interview: Paul Harding Author of Tinkers
Shelf Unbound: What first planted the seed of Tinkers in your head? Paul Harding: My maternal grandfather’s stories about growing up in Maine. Like George Washington Crosby, his father had epilepsy and abandoned the family when my grandfather was 12, after discovering his wife’s plans to have him committed to an asylum. Whether out of […]
Interview: Pinckney Benedict Author of Miracle Boy and Other Stories
Shelf Unbound: What was the genesis of the story “Miracle Boy”? Pinckney Benedict: “Miracle Boy” came about primarily as an evocation of a couple of terrors from my childhood. The first was riding on the fender of the various Allis-Chalmers tractors on my family’s dairy farm. We owned three Allis-Chalmers tractors, in various horsepowers and […]
Interview: Kevin Jack McEnroe Author of Our Town
Shelf Unbound: Why did you want to tell the story of your grandmother’s drug and alcohol addiction, given that, as you said in a recent issue of People, you barely knew her? Kevin Jack McEnroe: In my family, my grandmother was considered a sort of cautionary tale, and I grew up knowing her in this […]
Review: Yoga for Freedom by John P. Vourlis
In Yoga for Freedom, John P. Vourlis relates the experiences of twenty volunteers who travel to Nepal with an organization called the Imagine Foundation to raise awareness of child slavery and human trafficking in the area. Early on, Vourlis provides background information on the issue, noting that widespread poverty in Nepal “leaves children vulnerable to […]