Joseph O’Neil, the author of the novel Netherland, talks with Guernica about political fiction, his favorite Supreme Court decision, and the characters in his new book of stories, Good Trouble: “These are, for the most part, bourgeois American men and women that we’re reading about. They don’t lay a greater claim to one’s compassion or understanding than anyone else, and in fact they probably have a weaker claim than most, because they’re all set, in theory. But they happen to be the people I feel I can write about with maximum authority—and they happen to be involved, these genteel and bourgeois Americans, in a humanistic experiment no less crucial and radical in its implications than the experiments historically conducted by communists, royalists, rebels, or what have you.”
The Brooklyn-based series Murmrr has booked novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard to read and discuss his work on September 26.
A list of forty-five things Varlam Shalamov, author of The Kolyma Stories, learned while serving time in a Soviet gulag.
Fiction writer Ottessa Moshfegh picks her favorite books.
Marlon James pays homage to Franz Ross’s 1974 novel, Oreo.
Ron Charles wishes that writers who have received negative reviews would talk back to their critics more often. “I wish more authors were willing to respond in public to reviews of their books. Not that we need every disappointed writer to go all Alain de Botton and declare, ‘I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make.’ But our literary culture would be richer if we could observe more interactions between authors and critics.”