Tottenville Review

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.

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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.

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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.

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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"…

Interviewed by Sunil Yapa

Salvatore Scibona’s debut novel, The End, published in 2008, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and it won both the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library and the Norman Mailer Cape Cod Award for Exceptional Writing. The novel earned comparisons to Faulkner, Stein, and even James Joyce. In 2009 Scibona was awarded a Whiting Writer’s Award, in 2010 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he was recently highlighted by The New Yorker as one of “20 under 40” writers to watch. He is the coordinator of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

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Interviewed by Liz Moore

John Wray was chosen as one of Granta’s “Best Young American Novelists” in 2007. After the publication of his first novel, The Right Hand of Sleep, he was awarded a 2001 Whiting Writers’ Award. His second novel was Canaan’s Tongue. Both of his first two novels were met with a great deal of critical success. Of the former, Anna Shapiro wrote in The Guardian, “Wray is a poet, and it shows”; of the latter, Sam Lipsyte wrote in the New York Times, “There is wild, wicked music throughout these pages.” But it is his most recent novel, Lowboy (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2009), a literary thriller that centers on an unmedicated, schizophrenic teenager who has disappeared into the subway system of New York, that has been a popular breakthrough for Wray. In June, I met with him at his favorite café in Brooklyn. We sat in the backyard. He ordered warmed-up chocolate cake. We talked about wedding bands, ornithology, and Tom Clancy.

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Interviewed by Brianne Kennedy

Jazz is blaring through the speakers at the Brooklyn Lyceum and I am worried about two things. The first is that the music is drowning out Ned Vizzini, the eloquent young author sitting across from me, as I awkwardly attempt to record our conversation on my MacBook. The second is whether or not one of the two brownies the waitress brought over is meant for me. Had Vizzini placed a food order for himself or were these random tokens of kindness from the friendly barista? Continue reading "NED VIZZINI"…

Interviewed by Lee Bob Black

Discussed in this interview with author Justin Taylor: not thinking about writing, choosing whether to embrace or erase literary influence, the nonexistence of rules of writing, becoming a stronger reader, avoiding shooting your literary load on cryptic notes, writing about music, what an editor’s job really should be about, and how writing isn’t always a choice. Continue reading "JUSTIN TAYLOR"…

Interviewed by Jason Porter

Jeffrey Rotter’s 2009 debut, The Unknown Knowns, is a novel about water, museum displays, government agents, and obsessive hunches on human evolution that are not supported by the greater scientific community. It is about being certain something is true despite, or perhaps because, nobody else can see its truth. In the case of the protagonist, Jim Rath, the truth involves lost aquatic ancestors, and his commitment to better knowing this unknown, as in most good novels, creates a lot of problems. The book is painfully funny and funnily painful, and has recently been released in paperback by Scribner. Because Jeffrey and I are friends, and he is an unreasonably nice person, he humored my pathological discomfort with professionalism (even of the unpaid variety) and participated in the following interview, the conclusion of which was celebrated over obscene (in size and content) sandwiches in the outer reaches of the Brooklyn neighborhood we both share.

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Interviewed by Alex Gilvarry

Porochista Khakpour is the author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects, a remarkable debut novel published to wide critical acclaim in 2007. That year it was a New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” a Chicago Tribune Fall’s Best, and a California Book Award Winner for First Fiction. The New Yorker has called Khakpour’s “comic sense… infectious.”  And her debut novel, full of raw energy and exuberance, has drawn comparisons to Zadie Smith and Philip Roth. Khakpour’s latest story, The Deer-Vehicle Collision Survivor’s Support Group, recently appeared in Guernica.

Porochista has taught fiction as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bucknell University for the past few years, and this fall will be joining the faculty at the College of Sante Fe as a Professor of Creative Writing.

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