What is the point of memoir? And why might an author choose to process their life experiences through that particular form instead of, say, fiction or poetry? In this conversation, debut memoirists Shze-Hui Tjoa and David Martinez reflect on what the form means to them and their respective books, The Story Game, an interrogation of memory, childhood,...

We’re attempting to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who inspired them. This month, Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli, author of such books as Lost Children Archive and The Story of My Teeth, explores the new translation of Juan Rulfo’s landmark text Pedro Páramo. ...

We’re thrilled to reveal the cover for Sam Sax‘s forthcoming debut novel Yr Dead, slated for August 6.  Here’s a bit about the book, courtesy of McSweeney’s: In between the space of time when Ezra lights themself on fire and when Ezra dies the world of this book flashes before their eyes. Everyone Ezras ever loved, every place they ve felt queer...

In her new memoir Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen, Suzanne Scanlon recounts the years she spent in New York State Psychiatric Institute and Hospital. In chapters oscillating between memoir and criticism, Scanlon narrates her own experience while disassembling notions of madness, recovery, patienthood, diagnosis, and the asylum. She situates her story...

Toward the end of Percival Everett’s 2021 novel The Trees, about a series of murders in present-day Money, Mississippi, the small town where 13-year-old Emmet Till was brutally lynched in 1955, a list of Black Americans who died by lynching is read aloud by an academic who is researching the origins of racial violence. The list, compiled by a local...

About a year ago, I spent a lot of time with a 14-month-old who was learning how to speak. She could repeat certain sounds and occasionally mimic my words, but wasn’t quite able to ascribe meanings to the sounds and words she produced. I told my friends, in earnest, that she taught me more about language than I’d gotten from our graduate seminars on...