Bookslut

An Interview with Kate Greenstreet

"I think, in some basic way, I have a religious temperament. It's like being sexy, for instance -- some people just are, you know? They're filled with that thing that makes them sexy. Well, I'm filled with whatever it is that would make a person religious, except I just don't have religion." by Jean Valentine

An Interview with Sarah Manguso

"At college I wanted to be a classicist until my last semester, when I took a poetry workshop, applied to graduate school, and was accepted. Then I went to Iowa, having barely heard of literary magazines. Everything was new. During my second year, everyone said you're expected to send your thesis out to the book contests, and idiot's luck, mine was taken the next year, and for a little while I thought: "Yes, I'm a poet." But that whole time, before and during graduate school, I was publishing fairly uninformed criticism in a now defunct book review, and miscellaneous prose on the McSweeney's website -- I was all over the road. I didn't really feel like a poet. Or a writer, come to think of it. In my five-year college anniversary report, I declared myself a Freelance Copy Editor." by Jessica Ferri

Everybody Knows the Good Guys Lost: Reading The Sixties

Humans in every recorded era seem to have had that after-the-end feeling. Some of them had special words for it. And at any given moment, there’s usually at least one group of radical utopianists who believe we can turn the world into something beautiful, and a group of fascists who want to cleanse it, and a group of leftists who want an underclass uprising, and a zillion groups of religious fanatics who create weird rituals around food and sex and money and prayer. by Elizabeth Bachner

Halfway to Each Other

But look, this isn't really what Pohlman is about, or at least, not all of what she's about. In a voice genuine and likable, she writes about a year that really rocked her world, a year during which she turned a hard gaze on herself -- on her choices, her behaviors and her words -- in a way that sounds easy to do but isn't. And she gnaws right into the core of my ambivalence. by Barbara J. King

A Bei Dao Portfolio

Clayton Eshleman and Lucas Klein present four poems by renowned Chinese poet Bei Dao, in a new translation. by Clayton Eshleman

An Interview with Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa

"I didn't set out to write a novel with a political message but, of course, everything we write has a message one way or the other. The best way to answer you is to tell you that from the time I was a child I loved reading stories. I spent long hours reading in my room but I could never find myself in the literature I was given to read. Even as a literature major in college, I read many books I loved but none of them included the essential me. None of the media sources had realistic representations of my life and the lives of people I knew. What I did see on TV and the movies was the oversexed, red-clad, wild Latina, the gypsy-like curly haired, hoop-earringed Latina, the wisecracking, foul-mouthed gangsta Latina. Then there were Rita Moreno, and Chita Rivera and even Raquel Welch, the more palatable Latina." by Brittany Shoot

An Interview with Christos Tsiolkas

Tsiolkas addresses this directly, "My nephews and nieces will have a different consciousness. There are such strong bonds between them and their grandparents, but there will be a less tense understanding of migrant ethnicity."

I think of my son, the little emperor controlling all at his yia yia's when Tsiolkas says, "You know, they will not be hampered by class. Their parents are not speaking of class in the same way their parents did."

by Fotis Kapetopoulos

New Novellas

Yet Ever, for all the correspondences between it and The Collectors, presents a significantly different texture. Butler may confine his alterna-drama to a single indoor space, as Bell does, but it's a space without a setting. There's a suggestion or two of the hurricane alleys of the American South, but the context serves primarily as a platform for surreal metamorphosis and extraordinary style. by John Domini

An Interview with Andrew Cherlin

"Marriage has become a luxury good, almost a status symbol in the U.S. It's no longer necessary to be married, so why are people doing it? Because it is the first-class way to live your personal life. People want to show their friends and family they've made it. Marriage is the end of the quest, the top of the mountain, a capstone. Marriage used to be the first step into adulthood and now it's often the last. So people are postponing marriage while doing things only married people used to do: living together, starting a career, having children. In the 1950s people married first and THEN started adulthood. Now we don't marry until we've completed young adulthood." by Amy DePaul