Issue 129

Isabella Tree

‘I longed to know what she was thinking, what she did all day when she wasn’t performing rituals.’

Kent Haruf

‘I learned to live completely inwardly in those years.’

Alexandra Lucas Coelho

‘At forty, I think the world leads to the body. Besides, laid out on a stretcher, you are your only home’ .

Juan Pablo Villalobos

‘I was reassured to see that my hotel does not resemble the one in The Shining.’

Cynthia Ozick

‘Some stories begin with an incident, or a set of enigmatic circumstances, or a scene indelibly witnessed, or the relationship of unlike temperaments, or even something as gossamer as a mood. And then there is the kind of story that is rooted in an idea.’

Darcey Steinke

‘If pain is what makes others real to us, there was not another human being more real to me than my mother.’

Louise Erdrich

‘We live in these places out of necessity, lucky to have them out of the terrible explosion of humanity.’

Catherine Lacey

‘The possibility that I’d unwittingly tapped into her fate and used it as fuel for a story sickened me.’

Mona Simpson

‘A year later, still in third person, I’d taken five days off my character’s long wait. I’d moved to present tense, though, for more immediacy.’

Katherine Faw Morris

‘A lot of babies were born in skiffs during storms, their umbilical cords cut with rusty pocketknives.’

Thirza Wakefield

‘The wild is no place for women—the film would seem to say.’

Melinda Moustakis

‘We all would like to think that with one line, one brush, we could make a reader fall madly in love, and there are writers that elicit such a response with the appropriately gorgeous.’

Sigrid Rausing

Issue 128

Anthony Doerr

‘It has to be love, doesn’t it? In however many of its infinite permutations?’