Interview

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...

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...

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...

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...

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:...

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...

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...