An Interview with Rachel Rabbit White

Erin Taylor

An Interview with Percival Everett

James Yeh

An Interview with Tao Lin

David Fishkind

Mario Levrero in Conversation with Mario Levrero

Mario Levrero

An Interview with Dawnie Walton

Rochelle Spencer

An Interview with Elissa Washuta

Sarah Neilson

An Interview with Paul Lisicky

Rajat Singh

An Interview with Chang-rae Lee

Mimi Wong

An Interview with Forsyth Harmon

Crystal Hana Kim

An Interview with Ahmed Naji

Summer Thomad

An Interview with Joyce Meadows

Jim Knipfel

West x Midwest Presents: Marilynne Robinson and C Pam Zhang in Conversation

C Pam Zhang

An Interview with Ken Rosenberg

Rebekah Frumkin

An Interview with Alphonso Lingis

Jeremy Butman

Jeannie Vanasco in Conversation with Amy Berkowitz

Amy Berkowitz and Jeannie Vanasco

An Interview with Robert Thurman

Jane Ratcliffe

Ingrid LaFleur in Conversation with Rasheedah Phillips

Constance Collier-Mercado

A Microinterview with Niela Orr and Ismail Muhammad

Ismail Muhammad and Niela Orr

The Process: Morehshin Allahyari, She Who Sees the Unknown: Kabous, The Right Witness and The Left Witness, 2019

Katie Peyton Hofstadter

An Interview with Tegan and Sara

Marisa Matarazzo

An Interview with Arthur Jafa

Ross Simonini

An Interview with Stephen Harrod Buhner

Ross Simonini

An Interview with Katherine Silver

Aaron Shulman

An Interview with Matthew Thurber

Shelby Shaw

An Interview with Amanda Yates Garcia

Sarah Gerard

An Interview with Mark Haber

Martin Riker

An Interview with Leslie Jamison

Casey Cep

Marina Abramovic on Yugonostalgia

Aurora Prelević 

A Microinterview with Sandra Cisneros and Liliana Valenzuela

Sandra Cisneros and Liliana Valenzuela

An Interview with Raphael Bob-Waksberg

Rachel Davies

Go Forth: Indelible in the Hippocampus edited by Shelly Oria

Robert Lopez

Beckett Meets Melville: An Interview With Conor and Judy Hegarty Lovett

Jim Knipfel

An Interview with Kathryn Scanlan

Liza St. James

Tash Aw in Conversation with Chia-Chia Lin

Tash Aw and Chia-Chia Lin

An Interview with Cate Le Bon

Rachel Davies

In Conversation with Trisha Low

Claire Grossman

An Interview with Kathleen Alcott

Francesca Pellas

An Interview with Shane Jones

Alex Higley

An Interview with Jon Staff and Pete Davis

Lucy Schiller

An Interview with Writer Ben Greenman

Stephanie Pushaw

An Interview with Poet Nicole Sealey

Jessica Lanay

The Process of Making Comics with Alex D. Araiza

Kristen Radtke

“AN IMAGE IS A RELATIONSHIP.”

Stephanie Palumbo

“All of my interesting opinions are based on shit, really.”

Travis Atria

“A beautiful thought is a beautiful thought, no matter what the sign above the shelf where you encounter it.”

“Really everyone is making up their own religion.”

Shannon Tien

Writing and Idiocy

Aaron Shulman

Redbeard’s Castle

Victoria Nelson

“The book should be something you protect yourself from by returning to your life.”

Jonathan Ball

“Getting to Take on That Life Temporarily.”

Kathryn Borel

Subjects That Interest Most People

Amy Feltman

Transcript as Metaphor

Patrick Gaughan

Ghosts on a Landscape

Karolina Waclawiak

An Inherently Paintable Moment

Ross Simonini

Animating the Unspeakable

Isabel Ortiz

“THE EYE, FIRST OF ALL…”

Erik Morse

“IF YOU’RE DOING SOMETHING THAT TERRIFIES YOU, MOST LIKELY YOU’RE DOING THE RIGHT THING.”

Rachel Matlow

“Aren’t I Making All This Up?”

Adam Baer

“Art as a sacred event.”

Nick Ripatrazone

Music, Influence, and “Deeply Unnecessary” Art

Ben Arthur

“The Purity of the Flawed”

Ann DeWitt

“I’m in pretend jail for conceptual art infringement.”

JT Thomas

Interview with a Plus One

Adam Baer

5×5: Brian Evenson

Hayden Bennett

“In the United States, the individualist argument is the myth we can’t get out of.”

Akshay Ahuja

Durbin x Durbin

Ben Fama 

“Words and utterance and magic and power, all tied into one centuries-old knot.”

Amy Feltman

An Interview with Filmmaker Sam Green

Anisse Gross

“The dirt you’re getting dirty in.”

“Something to be shared.”

An Interview with Lindsay Hunter

Juliet Escoria

Interview with a Luthier (i.e. Someone Who Makes Musical Instruments—in this case, for Arcade Fire, Spoon, and The National)

Adam Baer

“We don’t realize what we’re walking on half the time.”

David Leo Rice

An Interview with Karen Russel

“IT WILL KILL YOU, AND IT NEVER KNEW YOUR NAME.” An Interview with Karen Russell About Her Syllabus This is part of a series of conversations with writers who teach, where ...

“No one is capable of freeing oneself from society.”

Rebecka Bülow

“In order to be free enough, you have to love deep enough.”

Riayn Spaero

An Interview with David Bezmozgis

Ratik Asokan

“Laughing at something is a form of accepting it, or at least making peace with it.”

Chris Cobb

Artists Who Play Music

Aaron Gilbreath

Go Forth (Vol. 31)

Nelly Reifler

“The point for me is largely pleasure.”

Brenda Wang

Various Paradigms

Douglas A. Martin

“ALL OF THESE THINGS ARE POETRY.”

Stephanie Palumbo

“There is an ambiguity built into these stories and that’s why we like them.”

Karolina Waclawiak

5×5: Brian Evenson

Amina Cain

“When I’m looking back I’m actually trying to find some kind of a key to go forward.”

Jake Nussbaum

“IT’S THE STORY YOU ENTER, NOT THE CHARACTER.” An Interview with Aimee Bender About Her Syllabus  This is part of a series of conversations with writers ...

On Surveillance Poetics

Andrew Ridker

5×5: Brian Evenson

Brian Conn

“Pain can recalibrate your life.”

Kyle Minor 

5×5: Brian Evenson

Matt Bell

“If something looks wrong there is probably something wrong.”

Hari Kondabolu and Alex Edelman in Conversation

5X5: BRIAN EVENSON

“If your identity is inscribed for you from the outside, it’s even more difficult to escape.”

The Interstate Just Looks Like Subject Matter Now

“Connected but facing out at life alone, and separated in that aloneness.”

“We need a fantasy in order to live in reality.”

“A reading list is not my trophy case.” An Interview with Ben Marcus About His Syllabus

Drawing by Jos Demme This is the first in a series of conversations with writers who teach, where we discuss how they develop an idea for a course, generate a syllabus, and ...

Colin Winnette in Conversation with Victoria Chang

“We should have written Nightmare on Elm Street fan-fiction instead of The Silent History.”

Interviews with Wikipedia Editors

“We hope to hook a big fish, but we don’t know what we might find.”

You Are Vijay Seshadri

An Interview with Vijay Seshradi Vijay Seshadri is well aware of the many masks he wears. He has several ways to talk about them and he likes to talk about them. He’s good at ...

“Reading photographs may be like reading language, but only up to a point.” An Interview with Photographer Mike Slack

“Hyper subtle sexual ego”

Brucito Subversivo

“Wanting to kill yourself is so banal.”

“An incredible container for transformation.”

“I was a child psychologist’s wet dream.”

“MY RELATIONSHIP WITH MY SON FEELS LIKE A ROUGH DRAFT. IT’S UNCHARTED TERRITORY.”

An Invitation to Join the Human Race

“Something Just Beyond Words”

“I would like to live in that year forever.”

“Try to go beyond it.”

“We knew we were not liberated and were never going to be liberated. But we knew what liberation was.”

Madeleine Schwartz

“I now find myself on the other side of the curtain.”

“To die is very strange.”

“Let’s Make Yarn Art”

Food Faces: Jesse Ball

“You don’t have to do much to be transgressive, and that’s a problem.”

To Rage Against Meaninglessness

Various Paradigms

Interview with Writer Tamar Adler

“You don’t have to do—you just have to undo.”

Jan Estep in and as Art

Scott F. Parker

It’s just disappeared, the whole culture of reading

The Pressure Cooker as Transcendence

[gallery] Drawings by Rebecca Fishow  FOOD FACES: AIMEE BENDER In this series, Shane Jones looks at the diet of some of our favorite writers. In this installment he talks to ...

Mortify Your Curiosity: More with Anne Enright

On “Everyday Abstract, Abstract Everyday”

Jogging and Motel Selfies

An Interview with Ed Askew

The Reader Does Not Give a Shit About You

“It Fucking Sparkles.”

“Wouldn’t you want to party with a baby?”

True Lovers are as Rare as True Rebels

The Sharing Experiment: Brooklyn’s Mellow Pages Library and Reading Room

The Believer Interview with Erica Jong

“We’d just let the sky tell our story.”

“I’ll probably open a mescal bar. Or make instrumental music for Arby’s commercials.”

An Interview with Davy Rothbart

“That’s what art really tries to do. Just strip away all the pretense and it’s trying to entertain and excite.” A Two-Part Interview with Wayne White

Julie Thompson

“But that’s the way I was then and maybe still am: my ambition always outstripped my abilities.” A Two-Part Interview with Wayne White

Julie Thompson

“We don’t have to own all the marbles.”

From a new online exclusive:Elizabeth Gilbert interviewed by Vendela Vida * THE BELIEVER: You said that when it comes to your own work you’re “plodding and disciplined and ...

An Interview with Bob Odenkirk

“I wonder if by not asking for sympathy, some people have mistaken that as permission to step over certain boundaries.”

Jowita Bydlowska’s first novel, Drunk Mom, was published this past spring to much controversy in Canada; it’s the fascinating memoir of her own time as an alcoholic mother of ...

Cartographer of Word Galaxies

An Interview with Aaron Belz Aaron Belz, in his signature bow-tie, cow licked coif, and disgruntled expression, peered at the audience through thick, black spectacles and ...

“Something that’s not yourself.” — An Interview with Karl Ove Knausgård

Karl Ove Knausgård enters the empty cinema in the Ingmar Bergman Center with a package of cigarettes in his hand and asks me where I got my coffee. He runs away to get a cup ...

AN INTERVIEW WITH NICK ANTOSCA

The most common word I hear when discussing the writing of Nick Antosca is “sexy.” I agree because I met him once, three years ago, at a Mexican restaurant in LA where I ...

An Interview with Reggie Watts

I snuck into the first empty room I could find. It was the producer’s office at the film production company where I am working, and it was also time for my interview ...

An Interview with Kathleen Hanna

I recently talked with Kathleen Hanna in New York City, who was confused when I compared her to Bob Dylan. She thought I was saying she was old. So I explained to her that, ...

An Interview with Tom Morello

Tom Morello is asked in almost every interview when or if Rage Against the Machine will ever tour/record/write new music. For years the band’s guitarist has answered: there ...

[gallery] CHRIS EATON INTERVIEWS CHRIS EATON  While perhaps better known as the front man of folk-rock outfit Rock Plaza Central, Chris Eaton is also the author of three ...

GO FORTH (VOL. 14)

(One of the 340,068,392 variations on the first page of Alexandra Chasin’s novella for the iPad, Brief) It seemed like a good idea to talk to my friend Alexandra Chasin about ...

A TEACHABLE MOMENT

An Interview with Alissa Nutting Alissa Nutting's Tampa makes me shy – the overt, descriptive sexuality of Celeste, the book’s “protagonist”, is most described by reviews as ...

“The Safest Place To Be Is Always Halfway Into Your Future.” – An Interview with Radiolab

The story of “the end,” or even attempts at conceptualizing this story, can be mystifying, terrifying, and often times, unimaginable. Yet Radiolab manages to approach this ...

There Will Be Joy

An Interview with Conductor Laurence Equilbey  Is there such a thing as unhealthy addiction to a piece of music? If yes, I have it. For months now, I cannot stop watching the ...

Scratches in the Temple Wall – An Interview with Travis Nichols

Travis Nichols is a poet and a novelist, and one of the few who manages to be both in equal measure. Many of his poems (in the collections Iowa and See Me Improving) and his ...

“Do you ever practice?” – An Interview with Foxygen

When I first arrived at the Solid Sound Festival, which was organized by Wilco, everywhere I went, I was surrounded by stylish, alt dads and Kombucha and Kefir stands, and it ...

An Interview with Derek Erdman

Derek Erdman is a really good artist and a very nice person.  He used to live in Chicago where he made a lot of paintings and did a lot of things (have you ever heard of Rap ...

Mickey, Me, and I: An Interview with a Character Performer as Mickey Mouse

“If you count all the parks in Florida, there are at least 20 Mickeys working at any given part of the day.”

“Bringing Your Ghosts to Life” – Interview with Film Director Olivier Assayas

Olivier Assayas has spindly limbs, wears terrific T-shirts, and speaks softly and rapidly, with convulsive energy and a nervous stutter that suggests nothing so much as ...

Interview with Art Historian, Jennifer Doyle

(The audience at Sin-a-matic in Los Angeles, c. 1994. Photographer unknown.) I first encountered Jennifer Doyle’s work through her essay “Queer Wallpaper,” written for a ...

“It’s spelled Motherfuckers.”—An Interview with Rachel Kushner

(Gabriele Basilico, Contact, 1984) I was surprised when my friend Rachel Kushner told me that, having just finished her final edit for her first novel, Telex for Cuba, she ...

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4b0c7bdzfg?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281] This coming weekend at ...

“I HADN’T YET FOUND THE FORM THAT RELEASED MY BEST INTELLIGENCE.” – INTERVIEW WITH DAVID SHIELDS

After about twenty-five emails back and forth, David Shields wrote to say he was flying into Los Angeles and that I should come by his hotel on Sunset to talk. We walked ...

An interview with Matthew Blesso Matthew Blesso, founder and CEO of Blesso Properties, designs buildings to fulfill the physical and psychological needs of those who live in ...

An Interview with Michael Robbins

No one would accuse Michael Robbins’s debut poetry collection, Alien vs. Predator, of failing to attract much-deserved critical attention. Indeed—ever since Mr. Robbins was ...

THE AGE OF CELEBRITY SEX TAPES AND EXECUTION TAPES: AN INTERVIEW

In If You Won’t Read, Then Why Should I Write? (Penny-Ante Editions) Jarrett Kobek uses transcriptions of celebrity sex tapes to trace a narrative through decadent, ...

Interview with Art Shay

Below, an interview Colin Asher conducted with photographer Art Shay. Colin’s article “Never a Lovely So Real,” an examination of the life and legacy of Nelson Algren, appears ...

News from Nowhere

Porter Fox has published two essays in the Believer: “The Long Good-Bye Man,” on the “abstract-expressionist fiction writer” Fielding Dawson, and “The Last Stand of Free ...

“Desire is unquenchable” – an interview with Mari Ruti

You won’t find the three-house fishing community Mari Ruti was raised in marked on any map of Finland – it doesn’t have a name – but toss a dart somewhere near the Russian ...

AN INTERVIEW WITH PAULA BOMER In reviews and blurbs of Paula Bomer’s work, a word that keeps coming up is “raw”. As though picking scabs, she digs into the dark, spectral ...

At the turn of the twenty-first century, when Radiohead became the new gleaming hope for innovation in rock and roll, the band began renovating the dismal state of the music ...

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4SfpugTCBI?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281] Bob Hicok [Poet] When I ...

An Interview with D. T. Max

D. T. Max’s long-awaited biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, has been the end-of-summer book for readers of literary fiction. It has inspired ...

Mark Leyner [writer] Part I.  It has been almost fifteen years since Mark Leyner’s last novel was published. Many authors have gone longer between books—Thomas Pynchon went ...

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rthtzrhnE38?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281] A short interview with ...

It is the middle of a Thursday afternoon and I have just threatened Ellie Kemper, the comedic actress famous for playing doe-eyed, slightly-off naïfs in The Office and ...

TOBI VAIL INTERVIEWS GRASS WIDOW Grass Widow don’t sound like any other band. Struggling to describe what I mean by this in a review of their previous album, Past Time, I ...

[gallery] FRED ARMISEN ON FILMMAKER JOHN WATERS It’s interesting, the little threads of connection between artists that we don’t necessarily know about; like who ...

I have always pooh-poohed astrology, but late last year, after a conversation with a friend who had her birth chart made, and whose life it kind of changed, I searched around ...