Tête-à-Tête with Tom Piazza (Fiction Interview No. 1)

Tête-à-Tête with Tom Piazza (Fiction Interview No. 1)

Tom Piazza’s new novel, A Free State, chronicles two runaways—one black, one white, each masquerading to claim his own life.

"...we enacted our imagined scenes of plantation life, our comic dialogues, our walk-arounds and our solo routines, our 'Boatman Dance' and 'Clare de Kitchen,' assuming a set of alternate identities behind the burnt cork, and we found a freedom there, behind the dark mask. The bitter irony of it all was as yet invisible to us. We were innocents, and yet we were complicit in a monstrous evil, in ways we could not see."    —A Free State

Read, Kookaburra, Read: On Australian Literature

Read, Kookaburra, Read: On Australian Literature

To mark Australia Day, we asked some of our favorite book people—novelists, booksellers, librarians and critics—to write about the Australian books they love the most, or the ones they find quintessentially Australian, or that they find essential to the Australian canon. Some of their picks will be familiar. Others will surprise you, much as they surprised us. They’ve given us lots to look forward to in our future reading and re-reading.

On the Melancholy of Resistance

On the Melancholy of Resistance

In this new Encounter, Andrés Hax discovers a writer and a filmmaker who jolt his memories of place and help define his relationship with fictional locations. 

"It is a deep pleasure to read an author without any critical preconceptions because you are absolutely free to live inside of the work, to come to it on your own terms, to evaluate it as something new." 

Literature, or The Place Where History Becomes Immortal

Literature, or The Place Where History Becomes Immortal

Literature reminds us that we should never be afraid to look at something as though we’re witnessing it for the first time, however well we think we know it. This is one reason great books offer endless company and sanctuary. Each expedition into them reveals new vistas: the book becomes more intelligent as we grow alongside it. 

Bibliophoria: Brian Moore's Lies of Silence

Bibliophoria: Brian Moore's Lies of Silence

Late one night, the manager of a Belfast hotel receives an unexpected visit from the IRA. They’ve come, guns drawn, with an ultimatum: if Michael Dillon doesn’t smuggle a bomb into the hotel parking lot the next day—an act that will kill and maim dozens—the IRA will murder his wife.

Sojourn: New Orleans in Photographs

Sojourn: New Orleans in Photographs

“New Orleans is not in the grip of a neurosis of a denied past; it passes out memories generously like a great lord...”   —Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality

Kevin Rabalais shares the sights and scents of one of America's most vibrant cities. 

Anatomy of a Sentence: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars

Anatomy of a Sentence: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars

“The earth teaches us more about ourselves than all the books in the world, because it is resistant to us.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Daniel Stephensen explores this revelatory sentence that opens Wind, Sand and Stars, an integral phrase missing from some translations. 

New Year, New (Book) Resolutions

New Year, New (Book) Resolutions

“Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.”   —Virginia Woolf

Join us in our Reader's Pledge for 2016, buoyed by some of our favorite writers on the joys and challenges of reading. 

Fifty Years of Reading Cormac McCarthy

Fifty Years of Reading Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy's debut novel, The Orchard Keeper, turned fifty this year. To celebrate its anniversary, we invited Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville, Weatherford Award-wining poet and Tennessee native Jesse Graves, and the Buenos Aires-based writer Andrés Hax to discuss their experiences of reading McCarthy through the years. 

She Opened a Bookshop...

She Opened a Bookshop...

It takes a special person to open a bookstore, someone with a mix of optimism, compassion, endless curiosity about the lives of others and, perhaps, a bit of delusion. 

In the five decades since Mary Stuart Kellogg and her sister, Rhoda Norman, established Maple Street Book Shop, generations of readers have embraced the little wood-frame sanctuary as a second home.

In celebration of Mary Kellogg’s life and her gift to the New Orleans literary landscape, novelist Christine Wiltz reflects on this influence.

Bibliophoria: Nick Gadd on Rebecca Solnit

Bibliophoria: Nick Gadd on Rebecca Solnit

“Rebecca Solnit taught me to walk. Not in the literal sense, obviously. But it was because of Solnit that I made walking a central part of my life.” —Nick Gadd

This installment of Bibliophoria features novelist and essayist Nick Gadd (of Melbourne Circle) on Rebecca Solnit’s wonderful books about walking and how they've altered his path.

On Air: Peter Cooley, Night Bus to the Afterlife

On Air: Peter Cooley, Night Bus to the Afterlife

Earlier this year, Peter Cooley became Louisiana’s newest poet laureate. The Detroit native who calls New Orleans home has, over the past decades, become a beloved figure in the fabric of Louisiana literature. In this installment of On Air, Peter Cooley reads his post-Katrina poems from Night Bus to the Afterlife.

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