Rowan Somerville was born in the West End of London in 1966. He was educated by Jesuits and took an honors degree in Literature from the University of Edinburgh. He has since recovered and worked in film, television and radio and he now lives in Paris and various parts of Ireland. He has published two novels The End of Sleep (W.W. Norton, 2008) and The Shape of Her (Phoenix, 2008). We encourage you to email him (see below).
Archive for the ‘Interviews’ Category
Justin Torres
An interview with Justin Torres, by Jessica Soffer
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Our interview took place over the phone. Justin Torres lives in San Francisco, where he has lived before under different circumstances—in his twenties, he says, in a “wild and total crazy mess.” Now, he’s a grownup: car, house, fiancé, fellowship (Wallace Stegner at Stanford), teaching gig, and heaps of critical acclaim for his gorgeous debut, We the Animals. One can tell from the lift in his voice that his face is permanently engaged in a smile, either from sheer joy (read the reviews) or from shock. Mahogany bookcases lined with the classics were not part of his upbringing. And yet, look at what he’s done. We the Animals is a wild kitten of a novel—ferocious, tiny, loud and delicate in the same breath. This semi-autobiographical novel is comprised of relatively chronological fragments of a boy’s childhood in upstate New York, spent emotionally and physically rough-housing with his two brothers, white mother, and Puerto Rican father. Animals’ structure is as much about memory as is its content, which is at once brutal and heartwarming. Justin (on the phone) is very much the same: blithe and winsome, with shadows of something much much deeper. One wonders if he might have written a dark children’s book instead of this one—as he manages the nostalgia, whimsy and then, boom, rawness, so gorgeously well. –Jessica Soffer Continue reading "Justin Torres"…
Helen Phillips
An interview with Helen Phillips, by Reese Okyong Kwon
Maybe it was the mouse carnival that did me in. Or was it the factory where virgins are made, or grocery shopping with Bob Dylan, or could it have been the moment when a man turned into a rainstorm? Helen Phillips’s debut collection of one-page fabulist stories, And Yet They Were Happy, is thronged by wonders. It is the work, as Amy Hempel has said, of a “deeply interesting mind.”
Helen is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the Meridian Editors’ Prize, and a Ucross Foundation residency. Her work has appeared in the Mississippi Review, PEN America, and Salt Hill, among others. She lives in Brooklyn. Helen and I went to college and graduated school together, and this interview took place over the past month.
—Reese Okyong Kwon Continue reading "Helen Phillips"…
Emma Straub
An interview with Emma Straub, by Miranda Popkey
Emma Straub’s debut, Other People We Married, is a story collection to be savored. Read it too quickly and you’ll run the risk of missing the small moments that come to shape Straub’s characters and her stories. A subtle shift portends a larger upheaval; a small jab becomes emblematic of a deeper rift; a word said or unsaid derails an entire conversation. Those moments—identifiable in life only in retrospect, when everything is irrevocably different—when things begin to change, are Straub’s strength, and their accumulation is one of the virtues of Other People We Married. (Straub’s sharp characterization and cool, clear sentences can be counted among the many others.)
Peter Mountford
An interview with Peter Mountford, by Sunil Yapa
After graduating from college, Peter Mountford lived in South America working as a “hack economist” (his words) for a right wing think tank. Since then, he’s been writing fiction. A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, his debut novel, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt this month. David Shields, usually no fan of fiction, said that the book “is, quite simply, one of the most compelling and thought-provoking novels I’ve read in years.” Jess Walters compared it to Graham Greene, writing, “A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism is a terrific debut novel—smart, moving, beautifully written.” Set in Bolivia in 2005, following Evo Morales’ election as president, the novel charts the journey of a young American, Gabriel Francisco de Boya in his mission to turn a profit for a notoriously unscruplous hedge fund. Peter and I, friends since we were both waiters at the summer literary conference, Bread Loaf, talked over Skype, drinks, and email.
Continue reading "Peter Mountford"…
Minal Hajratwala
An interview with Minal Hajratwala, by Sangamithra Iyer
Interviewed by Sangamithra Iyer
Minal Hajratwala is a writer, performer, poet and queer activist. Her first book Leaving India: My family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents has received a Pen USA Award, an Asian American Writers Workshop Award, a Lambda Literary Award, a California Book Award (Silver, Nonfiction), and was shortlisted for the Saroyan International Writing Prize. The book took seven years to write, and during that time, Minal traveled the world to interview over seventy-five members of her extended family, while sifting through photographs, old passports and archival documents. Leaving India blends history, memoir and reportage and examines the migrations of the Indian diaspora and how political forces intersected personal choices. Minal is currently seeking a publisher for her poetry collection, The Unicorn at the Racetrack, and will be editing an anthology of contemporary LGBT stories from India. (For inquiries and submissions, contact anthology@queer-ink.com) While in India on a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship, Minal took some time from working on a new novel to answer a few questions for Tottenville Review.
Tiphanie Yanique
An interview with Tiphanie Yanique, by Kaitlyn Greenidge
Interviewed by Kaitlyn Greenridge
Tiphanie Yanique’s debut short story collection, “How to Escape From a Leper Colony” was released in March 2010 by Graywolf Press. The National Book Award Foundation recently named her one of the “5 under 35 Emerging Writers.” In addition, she was nominated for the 2010 Cork City Frank O’Conner Short Story awards and her book was nominated to the Boston Globe’s “Sixteen Authors to Watch.” She is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Kore Press Fiction Prize, The Academy of American Poets Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship in writing and the Boston Review Fiction Prize. She is currently a professor of Creative Writing and Caribbean Literature at Drew University. She is from the Virgin Islands and lives most of the year in Brooklyn, New York.
Ander Monson
An interview with Ander Monson, by Pamela Pierce
Interviewed by Pamela Pierce
Ander Monson is the author of Neck Deep and Other Predicaments (2007), winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. In Vanishing Point (2010), he questions the status of the “I” in U.S. culture. Vanishing Point explores topics ranging from the chemically engineered flavors of Doritos to the largest ball of paint in Alexandria, Indiana, while continuously questioning the status of “truth” in creative nonfiction. For his novel in development, A Beginner’s Guide to the Labyrinth, Monson received the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship with a stipend of $25,000. He lives in Tucson, Arizona and edits the online literary journal, DIAGRAM. DIAGRAM celebrates the various forms writing can take. The tenth anniversary issue of the magazine was published as a deck of cards (see it featured in Poets & Writers November/December issue). The deck was playable and readable.
Josh Weil
An interview with Josh Weil, by John Charles Gilmore
Interviewed by John Charles Gilmore
The first thing I read by Josh Weil was a rather humble announcement he’d posted to an online political community—of which he was an active member—about his debut, The New Valley (Grove, 2009). I was interested in who the anonymous poster was, so I followed links from his profile to his personal website, where it became immediately clear that he was a serious writer and that this was a serious book. But it wasn’t until months later—when I ran across his short story “Salt Lake” at fivechapters.com—that I knew the writing he did, in addition to being serious, was good. I’d later read the three novellas that make up The New Valley, each of which feels to have been unearthed from some sacred cellar. Weil clearly maintained all the correct temperatures and just the right humidity. Cynical, fragmented, post-post-everything readers, please dig in: the most over-Facebooked of us is not too far gone to be sucked straight back to our story loving roots by The New Valley’s character-rich novellas, crafted sentences, and rustic words.
Weil was awarded a 2009 “5-under-35” award by the National Book Foundation, and The New Valley won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2010. For the fall of 2010 he was writer-in-residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut. This interview took place over the course of several months, a couple of which Weil was a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony.
Daphne Kalotay
An interview with Daphne Kalotay, by Deborah Bennett
Interviewed by Deborah Bennett
Daphne Kalotay, the critically acclaimed short story writer, has turned her attention toward the novel with stunning results. The highly anticipated Russian Winter is set for release in September of this year and is forthcoming in seventeen foreign editions. The story alternates between modern-day Boston and post-WWII Moscow. Continue reading "Daphne Kalotay"…