Taiye Selasi, whose “The Sex Lives of African Girls” appeared in Granta and Best American Short Stories 2012, and whose debut novel Ghana Must Go I just bought, talks about her process and style.
Ha Jin on the importance of first paragraphs, clear stakes, and tension in fiction.
My writing, I’d say too, is an extension of the pulpit…it reaches folks who don’t care for organized religion in a different way.
“People often ask me how to write real good. Here I give interview on such topic.”
Chad Harbach talks about The Art of Fielding, the novel I’m currently reading and loving.
The American Reader has been called the next N+1 or The Paris Review, and this extremely enlightening interview with the Romanian novelist Dumitru Tsepeneag doesn’t hurt that claim.
Claire Vaye Watkins talks about her book of stories, Battleborn, which I’m currently reading and being blown away by.
“All of my first stories were like, Once upon a time there was a valley of peaceful unicorns. NEW PARAGRAPH. And then there was a flood!” - Karen Russell
Philip Roth says he is done writing fiction. But how’d he get started in the first place?
Marie-Helene Bertino chats with Amanda Faraone over at Fiction Addiction. Read the interview, then read one of Bertino’s stories. Or, vice versa.
![guernicamag:
(via Living Novelistically, Richard Wolinsky Interviews Salman Rushdie - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics)
I put [the wig] on, and we went to the middle of London just near Harrod’s department store, and I got out of the car with this thing on my head, and people on the sidewalk literally burst into laughter. People were literally laughing and pointing. [laughs] It was so embarrassing. I had somebody say, “Oh, look, there’s that bastard Rushdie in a wig.” [laughs] And I just dived back into the police car and took it off my head, and I said, “I’m never wearing that again.”
Read more Guernica interviews](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbzpakfUkh1r7mk3fo1_r2_500.jpg)
I put [the wig] on, and we went to the middle of London just near Harrod’s department store, and I got out of the car with this thing on my head, and people on the sidewalk literally burst into laughter. People were literally laughing and pointing. [laughs] It was so embarrassing. I had somebody say, “Oh, look, there’s that bastard Rushdie in a wig.” [laughs] And I just dived back into the police car and took it off my head, and I said, “I’m never wearing that again.”
"I don’t understand the novel. How do you keep everything a novel requires in your head? A friend of mine was about three-fourths done with her novel when she realized she had two characters named Bob in it. That’s the kind of thing that would happen to me."
—
Amy Hempel, in an interview with Paris Review (2003).
If you try to write like Nabokov, there will always be at least one person (whose name is Nabokov) who’ll do it better than you. But when it comes to writing the way you do, you’ll always be the world champion at being yourself..
“A great work of literature [searches for the word] transcends its genre … and that includes [air quotes] literary fiction [/air quotes].”
