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Tales of Toxic Mushrooms and Dirty Bombs in New York
In my latest piece for WNYC, novelists Jill Ciment and Adam Sternbergh reflect on New York real estate, iconic scary movies, and what it would take to bring the city to a standstill. Sternbergh’s new...
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Our Diaries, Ourselves
I reviewed The Folded Clock: A Diary by Heidi Julavits and Ongoingness: The End of a Diary Sarah Manguso– and reflected on my own diary-keeping habits– over at The Los Angeles Review of Books. The...
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Pulitzer Winner Gregory Pardlo on Life as a Poet in Bed-Stuy
I recently spent a glorious spring afternoon with Gregory Pardlo, the winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize in poetry. We chatted on his stoop, and then we walked to a few of the neighborhood spots...
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Muslim/American: Storytelling
Tomorrow night at The Greene Space, I’ll be hosting a conversation with three particularly brave and brilliant Muslim-American New Yorkers who have each made tremendous journeys– with their families,...
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Oreo: A Comeback Story
My story about Fran Ross’s all-but-forgotten 1974 novel Oreo aired on this week’s episode of On The Media. I talked to Harryette Mullen, author of the afterword of the new edition of the book, and to...
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Brooklyn Book Festival: WNYC’s Book Swap Beer Spectacular
Join me Thursday, September 17th at WNYC’s Greene Space for a night of beer, books, and conversation with special guest Naomi Jackson, author of The Star Side of Bird Hill. Details and tickets:...
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From Bangladesh to Brooklyn: Tanwi Nandini Islam’s ‘Bright Lines’
Novelist Tanwi Nandini Islam and I wandered through Brooklyn and talked block parties, miniskirts, the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, and “wish-fulfillment” in her novel Bright Lines. Here’s her...
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The Making of ‘The Book of the Year’
If you’ve clicked through any “best books of the year” lists– like The New York Times‘, the Wall Street Journal‘s, NPR ‘s, or the Atlantic‘s– you may have noticed a title which made all of them: City...
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Mapping the Pungent History of ‘Brooklyn’s Curious Canal’
Licensed NYC tour guide Joseph Alexiou walked me along the symphonically stinky Gowanus Canal and discussed his new book, Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal. Hear my WNYC story here.
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Books of 2015: My Favorites
And just like that– another year grinds an end. It was a good year in reading. Here, in no particular order, are the ten best books published in 2015 that I read this year. If you’re in Chicago, tune...
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Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship
I’ll be speaking with Anjan Sundaram, author of Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship tomorrow night at BookCourt in Brooklyn. It’s the South Asian Journalists Association’s first event of...
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Can a Big Government Push Bring the Nobel Prize in Literature to South Korea?
This story has been in the making for quite a while. In 2011, I first got curious about Korean writing in translation; this past fall, thanks to a generous grant from the International Center for...
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Print is Back, Back Again
The radio version of my New Yorker story on South Korean literature airs this week in a special hour I’ve been working on for On the Media, which is all about the state of the publishing industry and...
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The Crazy Human Heart
I interviewed Daniel Mendelsohn for Virginia Magazine. It was a treat to sit down with a critic whose work I’ve admired for a long time and talk about how he approaches his work. The headline comes...
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Boyhoods: Hirsh Sawhney and Akhil Sharma
I recently got to spend an evening at Columbia University’s j-school moderating a conversation between novelists Hirsh Sawhney (author of South Haven) and Akhil Sharma (author, most recently, of Family...
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‘The Teeth of the Comb’
I profiled Syrian writer Osama Alomar for The New Yorker: In 2014, Osama Alomar was working as a cab driver in Chicago when he learned that the suburb of Zamalka, just outside the heart of Syria’s...
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A Collection of North Korean Short Stories and the Mystery of Their Origin
I wrote about The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea for The New Yorker. The book and its back story are pretty fascinating: The story goes something like this: nearly thirty years...
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The Complicated Backstory to a New Children’s Book by Mark Twain
I wrote about the racial politics of a new Mark Twain’s children’s book for The New Yorker: When Mark Twain died, in 1910, his literary output slowed but did not cease. In the decades since, Twain’s...
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Walton Ford and Emma Cline at The Greene Space
I really enjoyed talking about lions, bears, griffins, communes, murder, “the duality of glamour and catastrophe,” and other California specialities with writer Emma Cline and artist Walton Ford last...
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“The Accusation: Dissident Fiction from North Korea” at NYPL
Earlier this week, I interviewed South Korean human rights activist Do Hee-yun– the person said to be responsible for helping the manuscript of “The Accusation” escape North Korea– at the New York...
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