I’ve been looking more lately at how writers deal with questions of focus and concentration. In my recent interview with Karen Joy Fowler, I asked her about her process. She told me, “I write very much in fits and starts. And you know, that seemed like a problem to me—it probably is a problem—but I’m too old to fix it now.”

“Everything that you grow up with seems perfectly ordinary until you see somebody else’s family and you realize, no, this was crazy, this was always crazy.” Karen Joy Fowler talks about guns, families, and the dangers of too much Shakespeare.

I talked with the great Jesmyn Ward about Mississippi, Black Lives Matter, and her memoir “Men We Reaped,” recently published in Dutch as “De mannen die we oogstten.”

“Girl, Woman, Other” came out of a feminist impulse, which was to create these multiple narratives from women’s perspectives. But I also wanted to see…

While I’m talking with the poet and novelist Paul Beatty in his Amsterdam hotel, we spot another Booker Prize winner, Hilary Mantel, sailing through the lobby. Both have novels newly out in Dutch translation, and both did interviews the day before for a books program on Dutch TV. Beatty envies her interview skills, he tells […]

“I think most of my life I’ve felt very lucky, because I expected not to be able to write books, and I never really wanted to do anything else.” Interview on LitHub.

To interview the American writer Chris Kraus I don’t step into the lobby of a comfortable hotel. Instead I climb two narrow, scuffed flights of stairs to the little Amsterdam apartment […]

I talked to Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah about books, bologna sandwiches, the Harare Public Library, ‘Animal Farm’ in translation, living in more than one culture, and her new novel, ‘The Book of Memory.’

  On September 4 I moderated a reading with one of the writers I admire and love most, Margaret Atwood, for the John Adams Institute in De Duif in Amsterdam. There’s no recording of our conversation, but she read one of my favorite parts of MaddAddam, the story of Zeb and the bear, and you […]

For someone who can be so fierce in her fiction, Toni Morrison is remarkably easy to talk to. A conversation on the phone with her, at the house on the Hudson River where she’s lived for years, is warm, fun even—if you’re allowed to say that about a Nobel Prize-winning author. She tells stories. She heaps praise…