Elissa Washuta. Photo: K. R. Forbes In her new collection of linked essays, Elissa Washuta explores heartbreak, the occult, and the legacy of settler colonialism in the US. Weaving Native folklore with the history of exploitation of tribes such as the Duwamish people—alongside analysis of Twin Peaks, Fleetwood Mac videos, and the Oregon Trail II computer game—Washuta considers broader notions of inheritance, magic, and value. For Bookforum, Washuta and I chatted over Zoom about narrative, literary Twitter, and learning to cede control. ELIZABETH LOTHIAN: You play with narrative a lot in White Magic. Can you talk a bit about

Rachel Kushner. Photo: Gabby Laurent JULIA PAGNAMENTA: In a recent interview hosted by 192 Books, Ben Lerner observed that your essays in The Hard Crowd “resist psychological access.” You replied that any self-reflection missing from the essays was “intentional,” and that you were interested in analysis rather than in therapy. That the difference between the two models might play a role in the kind of “self-revelations” you were “willing to share.” I thought of this exchange when reading “Popular Mechanics,” The Hard Crowd’s chapter on writer Nanni Balestrini, where you write about Alfonso Natella, the protagonist in his novel

Sarah Schulman. Photo: Drew Stevens. In your new book, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987‑1993 you write that you can’t tell the story of ACT UP chronologically because too much was happening at once. So, you arranged the book thematically. What did this allow you to do that you wouldn’t otherwise? It lets the reader experience what time was like inside the organization. It was so intense. So many people were suffering and so many people were acting. In the back of the book, I do give a timeline so if people

Jo Ann Beard. Photo: Franco Vogt With a year of lockdown and a year at home, what’s helping you stay in what you’ve described as the “underwater” imaginative space of writing, and what’s making it harder? I’m on sabbatical this year, and made a decision, even before the pandemic, that I was going to use it as an opportunity to do nothing. I’ve more or less worked full-time since I graduated from high school, and as you know, if you’re a writer, whatever you do for a living you always feel you have another full-time job on top of

EMILY GOULD: Can you tell us about the process for making your new collection, Taking a Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature, and Feminism in Our Time (Verso, $27)? What went into it and what was left behind?

Lucie Elven. Photo: Sophie Davidson In her fiction, Lucie Elven delves into the uses and abuses of language—the way it can obscure or uphold power dynamics, and act as medicine, a shield, or a trap. Elven’s new novel, The Weak Spot, is a fable and a tale of workplace power dynamics. The book’s nameless narrator accepts a pharmacy apprenticeship in a mountain town, where the pharmacy’s owner, Mr. Malone, trains her to think of her work as a type of therapy. She hears her customers’ fears and complaints, teasing out their secrets while Mr. Malone eavesdrops. This comes naturally

Legacy Russell. Photo: Mina Alyeshmerni In her first book, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, writer and curator Legacy Russell argues that our online identities can be tools for emancipation. Glitch Feminism portrays the online avatar as a laboratory where Black, queer, and gender-nonconforming artists have explored, experimented, and ultimately expanded notions of the self. By creating online identities that do not conform to society’s expectation of the body, the book asserts, Black, queer, and gender-nonconforming people can introduce glitches into the binary software of gender. “We will be not ‘single beings,’” Russell writes, “but be every single being and every

Stephanie Danler. Photo: Emily Knecht Stephanie Danler’s new memoir, Stray, begins with the author’s return to her native California after the publication of Sweetbitter (2016), her best-selling debut novel. Danler interweaves the mythology of the storied, volatile land she comes from with that of the three complicated people who shaped her most: her mercurial, alcoholic mother; her estranged, charismatic, meth-addicted father; and “the Monster,” a sadistically charming married man with whom she’s having a toxic affair. Stray sees Danler fight for independence and survival—an apt theme for a book released during the third month of a global pandemic. For