#literary-interviews

#literary-interviews

Casa Kahlo offers an unprecedented look into the famed Mexican painter's family home, Casa Roja, which stands just blocks away from Casa Azul in Mexico City. Kahlo would retreat to Casa Roja when Casa Azul got crazy.

Helen DeWitt's refusal of the Windham-Campbell prize highlights the tension between artistic integrity and the demands of self-promotion in the literary world.

New biographies and freshly issued retrospectives reexamine the lives and legacies of fashion's biggest names, from archetypical It girl Jane Birkin to the eternally ahead of his time Issey Miyake.

The third Wednesday or Thursday evening of each month, comic book shop Books with Pictures ( 1401 SE Division St) hosts this open-invite book club devoted to a wide variety of graphic novels-from the Bitter Root series, about a family of sympathetic monster hunters during the Harlem Renaissance, to an illustrated retelling of the 1872 queer vampire murder mystery Carmilla. Sometimes artists and writers join to talk about their latest work.

To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul. The concept I stick to - my core principle - is simple: I write in plain English, and only when I actually have something to say.

"Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era" quickly became one of my favorite nonfiction books written by a journalist. I appreciated how he showed the grueling, day-to-day work local journalism requires, and how many layers of people fought him in revealing the despicable work of the Ku Klux Klan.

It was the first Wednesday of December and the last One-Page Wednesday of 2025. Hosted by Portland novelist Emme Lund (The Boy with a Bird in His Chest) at the Literary Arts bookstore, the free monthly event is an open mic that functions more like a public writers' group. Students, aspiring writers, and National Book Award-winning authors hang out and read aloud one page from a work in progress.

Sophia Stewart poses a choice that many biographers struggle with: "what to do with the boring bits."

A writer is a kind of magician. Their job is to create living, three-dimensional people out of the ordinary stuff of ink and paper. This is no easy task, because readers can't literally hear, touch, or observe a character. Everything that defines a human being in real life-the physical space they occupy, or how they smell, feel, and sound-is stripped away, replaced by description. But authors have one major, mystical advantage: They can show you what's happening inside of someone's brain.

Sounding amused, publisher Pramod Kapoor recalls the reaction of the Indian cricketing legend Bishen Singh Bedi when he learned Kapoor was printing 3,000 copies of his autobiography. Only 3,000? he protested. I fill stadiums with 50-60,000 people coming to see me play and you think that's all my book is going to sell? Kapoor, the founder of Roli Books, explains that Bedi's legions of admirers were unlikely to translate into book buyers. That was in 2021.

Two fiction books about good friends coming from different circumstances. Two biographies of people whose influence on American culture is, arguably, still underrated. One Liza Minnelli memoir. These are just a handful of books coming out in the first few months of 2026 that we've got our eye on. Fiction 'Autobiography of Cotton' by Cristina Rivera Garza, Feb. 3 Garza, who won a Pulitzer in 2024 for memoir/autobiography, actually first published Autobiography of Cotton back in 2020, but it's only now getting an English translation.

We meet him as a Gumby-like figure, asleep on a dirt floor, with only a jug of water and a toy horse. He has no idea how he got there. When he's around seventeen years old, Kaspar meets his captor, rendered in the book as a shadowy, hatch-marked father: "The Man in Black." The man teaches him to write his name; he teaches him to take a few fumbling goose steps outside.

If you're hunkering down ahead of the big winter storm this weekend, we want to make sure you're well prepared. Yes, with batteries, flashlights, toilet paper, and food but perhaps most importantly with good reading material. We looked back through some recent interviews and Books We Love, our annual year-end reading guide, to find snowy suggestions to get you through the storm.

Punxsutawney Phil has emerged from his cozy underground burrow and spoken: There are still six more weeks of winter ahead to endure. February may bear the unfortunate distinction of being the shortest month of the year, but it has no shortage of new releases hot off the presses. With winter still roaring in full force, this is the perfect time to catch up on the reading you swore you'd do as a New Year's resolution.

In addition to writing fiction, you're a staff writer for the and a screenwriter. How do you think of your career? I think of myself as a storyteller. I'm nosy, so once I'm telling a story, I want to know what happens. I do find, with fiction, I can't toggle in and out of it. It's like acting, where you have to stay with that character, in that world.

One of America's greatest living fiction writers returns with his first novel since 2018's Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize. In Vigil, the dying CEO of an oil company gets the Scrooge treatment when the ghost of a woman returns from the afterlife to help him cross over. If that sounds similar to Lincoln in the Bardo, don't be fooledthis one hits different. Despite its shorter length, Vigil is an equally powerful exploration of memory, compassion, and atonement.

Subsequently, runaway children turned the valley into a fortress, surviving on food they could catch or grow, with occasional forays into the towns below. Riley has heard the rumours, but it is only when she sees a green-clad boy or is it a girl? hovering outside her bedroom window offering directions on how to find Nowhere that she realises this might be her chance to escape and save her little brother from their sadistic guardian.