James Lasdun was born in London in 1958, the son of the prominent British architect Denys Lasdun. He made his literary debut in 1985 with the short story collection The Silver Age, and in the years since he has published three additional short-story collections, four volumes of poetry, and two novels—2002's The Horned Man and 2005's Seven Lies, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Lasdun moved to the United States in 1986 and has taught creative writing at Princeton, NYU, and Columbia University, among other institutions. His latest release, Give Me Everything You Have: On Being

Moscow-born and New York City-based conceptual artist and writer Yevgeniy Fiks has explored the various submerged narratives and counter-histories of the Soviet experience of Communism for more then a decade. A prolific artist and performer, his technique is a microhistorical unspooling of often-quirky archival finds that lead to an illuminating shift of perspective about aspects of the Communist past. His books include the Communist Guide to New York City (2008) as well as the hilarious and instructive Lenin for Your Library? (2007), a collection of acceptance and rejection letters sent to

Meg Wolitzer is a bestselling novelist and an unapologetic advocate for women writers. I have been intrigued by her work since reading The Wife (2003), a book about a successful male novelist and the woman behind him that offers incisive, witty commentary on contemporary publishing and the roles of men and women in that world.

Wolitzer is a force, and she has brought her ferocious energy, wit, and intelligence to bear on her latest novel, The Interestings, which follows a group of friends who meet at an arts camp as teenagers in the 1970s and remain connected throughout their lives. One member

Even an email from Wells Tower is a crackling read. To know why, you'd have to be familiar with Tower’s magazine writing, or with Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, a collection of nine short and sometimes brutal stories that moved David Sedaris to say that Tower might "reinvent the English language." It’s safe to bet that similar acclaim will meet Tower’s new book, which is slated for release next year. Whether Tower is depicting life with a traveling circus for the Washington Post Magazine or writing fiction from the perspective of a wounded stepchild, his voice always keeps readers in

As I’m reading my godson, Geronimo, his favorite book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, I look above my bi-focals across a cozy apartment decorated with artwork collected from all around the globe. There, in the kitchen, stands the toddler’s barefoot mother, Emily Raboteau. Her second child is on its way. I can’t help but laugh at the image: pregnant, barefoot, and in the kitchen. This woman is one of my best friends. As roommates during graduate school at NYU, I’d sit on my side of the run-down apartment smoking cigarettes out the window, pacing and cussing a blank computer screen, while she’d

I met with Rebecca Miller on a recent chilly afternoon in New York to talk about her ambitious new novel, Jacob's Folly (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux). Her previous books include a story collection, Personal Velocity, and a novel, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee; she also wrote and directed the films based on these books. While it may be for her films that she is best known (she is also the writer and director of "The Ballad of Jack and Rose" and "Angela"), Rebecca Miller is a novelist in her own right. We took refuge in the warmth of a West Village bistro, and over a long lunch discussed sources

Around the turn of the millennium, Sam Lipsyte was an almost secret writer who inspired obsessive admiration. I had started to write fiction then, and my fellow aspiring writers and I would share Lipsyte rarities—a story in a back issue of Open City or NOON, a well-worn copy of his debut story collection Venus Drive (2000) or The Subject Steve (2001)—like pre-internet punk rockers trading tape dubs of out-of-print 7-inches. He’s not so secret anymore, particularly since his critically acclaimed novel The Ask (2010), but his work continues to generate a rare sense of excitement among the writers

Ben Fountain’s literary breakthrough came at age forty-eight, eighteen years after he quit law to write fiction. His debut short-story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, earned him critical acclaim and a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2007. Five years later, Fountain’s first novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, received the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, was shortlisted for the National Book Award, and is a finalist for this year's NBCC award in fiction. The book takes place on one epic day in the life of nineteen-year-old Billy Lynn, a virgin from a small town in Texas who goes

In Laird Hunt’s provocative new novel Kind One, set during the antebellum era, a young woman, Ginny, leaves her family and everything she knows and loves to follow a man, Linus Lancaster, who is not who he claims to be. After moving to his farm, Ginny discovers that Linus is a selfish, abusive husband whose grandiose ideas about himself far exceed his abilities. During her early years of marriage, Ginny befriends Linus’s slaves, Cleome and Zinnia. When Linus’s attentions eventually turn to them, Ginny betrays her only friends and she becomes almost as cruel as her husband. I had the opportunity

Twenty-three years ago, writer Kurt Hollander fled a rapidly gentrifying New York City and settled 2,500 miles south in Mexico City. As the burgeoning megacity’s art scene expanded, he edited the magazine Poliester, ran a pool hall and a bar in the neighborhood of Condesa, directed films, and published several books on Mexican popular culture. Then he got sick. I spoke with him over Skype about his new book, Several Ways to Die in Mexico City: An Autobiography, and how to survive in a city that all too often seems like it’s out to kill you.

Bookforum: At the beginning of your book, you allude

Michael Fried is a professor of humanities and the history of art at Johns Hopkins University. He’s best known as a singularly influential art critic and historian, especially for his controversial 1967 Artforum essay “Art and Objecthood,” and for his trilogy tracing the genealogy of modern art back through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Absorption and Theatricality (1980), Courbet’s Realism (1990), and Manet’s Modernism (1996). He’s also written prolifically on photography and is a poet. In his newest work, Flaubert’s “Gueuloir,” the critic turns his attention to Flaubert’s first

Writing in Bookforum last year, Minna Proctor said of Lydia Millet’s fiction that it "takes aim at the metaphysical jugular.” Over the course of eleven books (including two for young adults) Millet has won the respect of readers and critics for creating "exquisitely flawed characters" and pushing them "beyond themselves, their experience, their expectations" towards powerful transformations. Though she's been shortlisted for a Pulitzer and awarded a PEN prize, Millet is not just an acclaimed novelist and short story writer; she is also a passionate environmentalist. The five years she spent