I encountered Vi Khi Nao's writing for the first time with her 2016 novel, Fish in Exile, which centers on a marital breakdown following the drowning of a couple's two…
On a cold night in March of 2017, I came to Srinagar, Kashmir, as a reporter. That night, while staying with my friend's twelve-year-old sister, Asma, I read an excerpt…
I corresponded with Paul Lisicky during the spring of 2020 as the pandemic caused everyone to stay at home. Each time I emailed him to schedule an interview, it was…
I had the pleasure of being introduced to Elissa Washuta at the Port Townsend Writers Conference in July 2019.
On the Olympic Peninsula, the days were sunny and the mornings…
I first became interested in Andrew Garfield and his work not from his starring role in the two big-budget Amazing Spider-Man films (2012, 2014), nor from his famous laptop-smashing scene…
When my girlfriend flew from Brooklyn to Las Vegas to visit me in early March of 2020, neither of us knew it would be the end of our long-distance era.…
Pat Metheny is a musical prodigy. He became a professor of jazz guitar at eighteen and a singular, melodic voice in contemporary music by his twenties, defining the sound of…
Since the late 1990s, the novelist Gina Apostol has been writing highly political and highly entertaining metafiction about the legacies of colonialism and dictatorship in the Philippines. I came to…
In 2019, on a whim, I signed up for a workshop called Alt Text as Poetry hosted at an art space in Brooklyn, New York. I wasn’t sure what to…
Over the last decade, Maggie Nelson’s writing has become one of the guiding intellectual lights for artists of all disciplines. Her books on aesthetics, gender, violence, and, most recently, freedom,…
Jonathan Lethem writes in his afterword to Shirley Jackson's last novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, that she unearthed the wickedness found within the ordinary, portraying how strictness…
In the golden era of rock and roll, originality was the only true goal for an honorable musician. But now, when the Beatles have lost their dominance over pop, the…
In 2017, I met Ottessa Moshfegh in a San Francisco hotel room on the press tour for her third book, Homesick for Another World. At that time, she was visibly…
A unique and idiosyncratic talent, John Cooper Clarke remains relatively niche in North America. Hailing from Salford, England, the man nicknamed “the People’s Poet” and “the Doctor” has, over the last…
