‘I think in the beginning it was a crisis. I started to write because I felt the need to fit in, and not be an outsider… I have felt bound to an outsideness and an otherness.’
Image by Kristianstads kommun
Lina Wolff on Dante, the artistic temperament and the tension she feels between a ‘Spanishness’ and ‘Swedishness’ when writing.
‘I think in the beginning it was a crisis. I started to write because I felt the need to fit in, and not be an outsider… I have felt bound to an outsideness and an otherness.’
Image by Kristianstads kommun
‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
Lina Wolff’s debut novel, Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs, published by And Other Stories in 2016, was awarded the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, Sweden’s Vi Magazine Literature Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2013 Swedish Radio Award for Best Novel of the Year. Her second novel, The Polyglot Lovers, won Sweden’s biggest domestic literary prize, the August Prize, as well as the Svenska Dagbladet Prize, and has been translated into eighteen languages. A collection of short stories is forthcoming from And Other Stories in 2020.
More about the author →Saskia Vogel is a writer and translator from Los Angeles, now living in Berlin. Her debut novel Permission was published in five languages. The Swedish edition was translated by Johanne Lykke Holm. Vogel has translated over twenty fiction, poetry, and non-fiction titles from Swedish into English, including works by Linnea Axelsson, Johanne Lykke Holm, Balsam Karam, Karolina Ramqvist, Steve Sem-Sandberg, Lina Wolff and Jessica Schiefauer, whose Girls Lost was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. Her translation of Johannes Anyuru’s They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears won the Firecracker Award for fiction. Vogel’s writing has been awarded the Berlin Senate Endowment for Non-German Literature and longlisted for the Believer Book Award and the Pushcart Prize. She was Princeton University’s Fall 2022 Translator in Residence. You can read her work in the New Yorker, LitHub, the New York Times, the White Review, the Offing, Elsewhere and elsewhere. Photograph © Fette Sans
More about the author →‘When we were sixteen years old, I broke Johnny’s nose with the back of my hand.’
‘No one here is normal except you, and you’re not even from Spain.’
‘Oline Stig doesn’t blindly obey the narrow logic of the dramatic curve, and she lets the story branch where it is necessary. The end is surprising and, so to say, out of tune in a liberating way.’
‘How far can one deviate from the accepted pieties before one is kicked out?’
Brandon Taylor on naturalism and the future of fiction.
‘It occurs to me then that he has not invited me for dinner, but my alter ego from the page.’
Tabitha Lasley on writing and dating.
Three video installments from The New York Review of Books conference ‘What Now? Europe and North America in a Disordered World’, 21-22 November 2009.
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