Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like)

In my first year as a book critic, I read about 150 books. Of those, I remember a small handful, and regularly recommend even fewer. But George Choundas’s story collection,…

I can’t count the number of times I’ve digitally fallen on my face in front of Erika T. Wurth. We’re friends on Facebook, and she always shares sides of life…

Anita Felicelli is exactly the kind of woman I want on my team. She’s a writer of stories, essays, and criticism; she’s sharp and funny without being mean; she’s a…

It’s a weird path that led me to Morris Collins, and to his exceptionally accomplished debut novel, Horse Latitudes. But how I found him stopped mattering around page 100 of…

I first became aware of Matt Lubchansky because of this installment of their webcomic, Please Listen to Me. I didn’t understand the posture of this comic when I first read…

I’ve admired Litsa Dremousis for some time now—for her strength, her stamina, and her unflagging support of marginalized writers. Imagine my surprise when, after I started asking her questions, I…

All I knew about Amy Pence, when I asked her to participate in this interview, was what I’d gathered from reading and reviewing her most recent book, [It] Incandescent. My…

I don’t remember how I came to own a copy of Kelcey Parker Ervick’s hybrid concoction, The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová, but I distinctly remember, after the first handful…

Brad Listi is a maverick. Not in the fakey politician sense, nor in the Tom Cruise sense; I use that word because he nearly always does the unexpected thing, and…

Eileen G’Sell and I have never met in person, but we met over the internet because of a girl on a bike. At the time, she was an editor at…

The road I took to my conversation with Sassafras Lowrey was weird and winding. During my (brief but passionate) immersion in the backlash against Fifty Shades of Grey, I read…

Neil Snowdon, UK resident, was introduced to me, California resident, on Facebook by a mutual Australian friend. How’s that for international connection? After I learned a little about him, I…

Ariel Gore has so much to teach all of us. She thinks about art in an all-encompassing way, whether that means keeping a printing press in a spare room or…

2017 was Samantha Irby’s breakout year. Among her accomplishments, she released a national bestseller, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life; she began developing a TV series based on her…