Authors

“Ghosts Usually Accompany Me through My Poems”: An Interview with Diane Seuss
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“Ghosts Usually Accompany Me through My Poems”: An Interview with Diane Seuss

Words just seem to have more possibilities in the poems of Diane Seuss. They become more flexible, more magnetic, attracting and accumulating meaning and music in a speedy rush to surprise, a hard-won clarity about what it’s like to be here, be human. Diane is the author of three books of poetry: Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf…

The Queen of the Night and Alejo Carpentier’s French Accent
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The Queen of the Night and Alejo Carpentier’s French Accent

In the first chapter of Alexander Chee’s long-awaited new novel The Queen of the Night, the opera-singer protagonist surprises party-goers at a Paris ball by bursting into an aria from Gounod’s Faust. The scene has a scandalous, erotic backstory (too complicated to recount here, but it involves two brothers with a saber fetish) explaining why…

pie with berries beside fork
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The High Art of Food Literature. Seriously?

“The writer who never talks about eating, about appetite, hunger, food, about cooks and meals, arouses my suspicion as though some vital element were missing in him,” wrote the Italian writer Aldo Buzzi, in his book, The Perfect Egg: And Other Secrets. Yet, writers who write primarily about food are called food writers, not just…

Sketch of Jane Austen
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Challenging Cultural Norms: Contemporary British Women Authors

  It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I realized what I’d been searching for all along. An avid reader, I absorbed a variety of books during my childhood and adolescence. These were carefully screened by my well-meaning but stifling folks, who paled at the thought me reading about sex and infidelities, teenage…

An Interview with writer Yu-Mei Balasingamchow
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An Interview with writer Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow is a fiction and nonfiction writer from Singapore. Her stories appear in the anthologies From the Belly of the Cat (2009) and Let’s Tell This Story Properly: Commonwealth Short Story Prize Anthology (2015), as well as in the journal Mänoa. Her nonfiction work includes Singapore: A Biography (2009), co-authored with Mark Ravinder Frost and commissioned by the National…