An Interview with Ross Posnock “It is not in the role of an artist to worry about life – to feel responsible for creating a better world. This is a very serious distraction. All your conditioning has been directed toward intellectual living. This is useless in artwork. All human knowledge is useless in artwork. Concepts

Asleep, She is a Horizon: On Simone Weil The truth about life is still obscure because we only read those vain and energetic enough to write. Even the secret diarists, your Pessoas and your Dickinsons, seem imbued with a kind of optimism about the truth of their pessimism, and their refusals to publish seem more

An Interview with Alison Kinney Everyone, Alison Kinney says, wears hoods. It’s the uniform of Zuckerberg and girls who visit their grandmothers in the woods, of basement bloggers and bad hair days, as familiar and cozy as a fairy tale — but hoods are also central of the stories of Trayvon Martin, Abu Ghraib, and

A Plea for Tenderness My friend T. says who cares if something lasts forever or not? The point is, it was. Plus if it’s a book — a website? — then sometimes it still is. For example, I read Anna Karenina in 2000, a full century-plus after its first publication, and the middle event alone

An Interview with Mary Rakow Mary Rakow is now an author of fiction, having moved into the art from theology. She has a Masters from Harvard Divinity School and a PhD from Boston College. This Is Why I Came is her second novel. In it, our oneiric guide Bernadette is returning to the Church for

An Interview with Joni Murphy Joni Murphy is my friend and fellow School of the Art Institute of Chicago alum, and we wrote our first books on the same block in Pilsen, taking respite at the same bar. But before that I knew Joni as an exemplary thinker and worker, in ways I didn’t even

An Interview with Anne Boyd Rioux Earlier this year, two of Anne Boyd Rioux’s projects came to fruition at the same time — specifically on February 29 — with the publications of Miss Grief and Other Stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson and Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist , edited and written by

An Interview with Esmé Weijun Wang You may be already familiar with Esmé Weijun Wang’s nonfiction. Her essays are powerful pieces that meld the science behind mental health issues with generous insight into her own personal experiences. Her essay “Perdition Days,” for instance, begins with this arresting sentence: “Let’s note that I write this while

An Interview with Hirsh Sawhney The year was 1994. Hirsh Sawhney was in junior high school when Kurt Cobain’s suicide made international headlines that April. Just a few weeks later in a suburb of New Haven, Connecticut, the boy with the locker next to Sawhney’s took his own life with a gun. “He was a