September 4, 2026 At Work A Poem Is Full of Meat: Dorothea Lasky on Mother By Luke Dunne Dorothea Lasky, via Wikimedia Commons; licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (left). Mother, Wave Books (right). Across ten collections of poetry and prose, Dorothea Lasky has shown herself to be a writer of formidable range. One of her books is based on The Shining; another, about Sappho, is forthcoming. Memory, her most recent collection of nonfiction, includes essays about fashion, Satanism, David Hockney, roses, anger, and Bernadette Mayer. But this omnivorousness belies a unified sensibility, one drawn to the uncanny, outré, and polychromatic (emphasis on the latter). Read More
August 14, 2026 At Work In the Studio with Chad Fore, the Writer Behind “Lil Spooky” By Owen Park Photograph by Kathleen McNamara. In the time between his first submission to the Review, in February of last year, and the publication of his short story “Lil Spooky” in our new Summer issue, the writer Chad Fore and I exchanged almost a hundred emails. I also read several of his stories, which tend to be somewhat autobiographical, at least in the sense that they often take place in one of Fore’s two neighboring hometowns—Piru and Fillmore, in Southern California—and are rich with the kinds of details and characters that feel impossible to invent. “Lil Spooky” follows its high-school-age protagonist, Brad Camacho, through his gradual—then all too fast—initiation into a local gang. In a humiliation ritual disguised as a tryout, he has to freestyle for members of the gang’s hip-hop arm, also known as the Sick Minded Clique, which records posse cuts in a “decrepit old shack” they call the studio, at the end of one of their driveways. Knowing what I did about Fore’s fiction, I wasn’t entirely surprised when, alongside the first draft of this story, he included the link to a song he was featured on when he himself was in high school. He and I talked about the musical influences of his characters and of his own past over lunch this spring, when, after all those messages, we were finally able to meet in person. I found he has an encyclopedic memory for rap verses, some by artists we both love, and others that he’s been writing in his head, he said, for twenty years. INTERVIEWER While we were editing “Lil Spooky,” you told me it was partly inspired by time you spent with your older cousin’s rap group in the nineties and early aughts. What drew you to that specific experience as a subject and how did you approach writing about it after so many years? CHAD FORE From the start I had in mind the type of story I wanted to write. When I think of friends from my hometown or family members who got involved in gangs or drugs or whatever—there were always opportunities before it got bad, where they could still get out of it. But then something happens, and they can’t anymore. I wanted the story to end at that moment where, without having been told anything, the reader would know that Brad’s in a different place, and now it is too late. There was one sentence that I almost cut. I went back and forth. Does this explain too much? Does it not explain enough? INTERVIEWER Which sentence? FORE “It was all pretend until the moment it wasn’t.” At a certain point you’ve fallen through the hole. That was the feeling I was trying to reproduce. Read More
June 30, 2026 At Work Rachel Aviv’s Act of Revision: On You Won’t Get Free of It By Stephanie DeGooyer At a glance, Rachel Aviv’s new book looks like a conventional kind of essay collection: six pieces drawn from more than a decade of writing for The New Yorker, framed by a new preface. You Won’t Get Free of It gathers some of Aviv’s most celebrated portraits, including those of Hannah Upp, who disappeared three times in nine years during episodes of dissociative fugue, and Andrea Robin Skinner, whose childhood abuse was suppressed within her family even as her mother—the writer Alice Munro—refracted it through fiction. But You Won’t Get Free of It is not just a greatest-hits compilation. Subtitled Stories of Mothers and Daughters, it is also an act of revision. As Aviv notes in the preface, she reported many of the older stories in the book while “feeling, existentially, like a daughter.” Years later, after having children, she returned to these pieces—newly aware, she writes, of “the drama on the mother’s side, too.” She revisited her notes to find details she might not have fully grasped as a younger reporter and reinterviewed subjects about facts whose significance she’d missed the first time. Read More
June 28, 2026 At Work The Mariah Carey Fan Club: A Conversation with Alex Da Corte By Hazel Byers From Alex Da Corte’s Rubber Pencil Devil. The cover of our new Summer issue features a detail from The End, a painting by the Venezuelan American artist Alex Da Corte. Da Corte works across film, sculpture, installation, and performance; using costumes and prosthetics, he has assumed the guises of Eminem, Mister Rogers, the Wicked Witch of the West, the Pink Panther, and Marcel Duchamp, among countless others. At the beginning of June, I went to Philadelphia to speak with Da Corte in his studio, tucked away in a warehouse behind the gates of a labyrinthine high school campus. In the back room, filled with books, papers, and a number of cartoonish props, we talked about Judy Garland, Mariah Carey, and Carey’s 1999 album Rainbow. When we broke from chatting to have lunch, Da Corte served me an excellent tuna salad. INTERVIEWER Will you tell us about The End? ALEX DA CORTE The End is what I call a CD painting, a reverse-glass painting I painted on plexiglass to obscure part of an image from the cover of Mariah Carey’s Rainbow. INTERVIEWER I was listening to “Heartbreaker” last night. She is so good. Why that album? DA CORTE I probably shouldn’t go on too much about how I love her, but I was part of the Mariah Carey fan club in the late eighties, and I wrote letters to her as early as I could. I remember reading that her father was Venezuelan, and I was like, Oh, my father’s Venezuelan! I was eighteen when I first heard Rainbow, and while my relationship to music, to my own sexuality, has changed since then, I also listened to the album just yesterday. INTERVIEWER What do you mean by “CD painting”? DA CORTE The CD paintings were born out of an interest in the readymade, a term associated with the work of Marcel Duchamp, relating to the idea of the found object. If I think about how I first began listening to music, part of what drove me to buy a CD was the image on the cover of the album. It never changes, but the image gets scratched, the liner notes get wrinkled, a kind of touch is transferred onto the music. The CD paintings are evidence of that transference. To make them, I took the liner notes of all the CDs I had that were beloved to me—Janet Jackson, Madonna, Mariah Carey—and scanned them and had them made into flags at a store across the street from the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia. The image that was scanned from the liner notes became a flag printed on cotton, stretched the way one might stretch a canvas. Then I laid a piece of plexiglass over the flag and painted a layer onto the plexiglass that obscured some of the image printed on the flag. Read More
April 17, 2026 At Work The Conundrums of Jan Morris: A Conversation with Sara Wheeler By Jamie Lauren Keiles Mount Everest. Photograph by Nir B. Gurung, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Jan Morris rose to fame in 1953 as a reporter working for the Times when she carried the news of the first ascent of Mount Everest back to base camp, England, and the world on the eve of Elizabeth II’s coronation. It was arguably the British Empire’s last triumph. Over the course of the next seven decades, Morris—at that time publishing as James—traveled widely through the empire’s dwindling dominion, writing sumptuously about colonial decline and the rise of a new postwar global order. After changing her sex in 1972 at Georges Burou’s famous Casablanca clinic, she published the best-selling memoir Conundrum (1974), a finely tuned and deeply felt account of the perils and strange delights of self-creation. When the scandal of her transformation had settled, Morris resumed her literary career, writing on Venice, Hong Kong, Trieste, the political rise of Abraham Lincoln, the history of Japanese battleships, and other geopolitical engrossments, until her death in 2020. Her life and work brought her into contact with many significant plot arcs of the twentieth century—not just the rearrangement of the world order but also the birth of LGBT civic consciousness. Despite this serendipitous proximity, she presents, in death, as a weak candidate for entry to any known saintly canon. Blithely humanistic, avowedly bourgeois, and often romantic to a point of equivocation, she’s suitable neither as a pride-month “trancestor” nor as a great literary firebrand. A new biography, Jan Morris: A Life—authorized by her children, who manage her estate—tries to figure out what to do with these loose ends. Its author, Sara Wheeler, is also a travel writer. She called me on Zoom with a shaky connection from “the ancient Atlantic Forest in central Paraguay,” where she was on assignment. We talked about Morris’s splintered legacy and the challenges of summing up a life. Read More
December 1, 2025 At Work Catching Up with Helen Fielding By Rosa Lyster Photograph by Romy Curran. Bridget Jones made her first appearance in February 1995, complaining amiably about her publishing job and obsessing over her rakish boss in a diary column in London’s Independent newspaper. “Last Tuesday, at the Cheapskate’s Wine Guide launch, weeks of flirtation appeared to climax. When the others were boring on about Stephen Fry […] Daniel moved behind me and murmured, “So … will I see you?” and then, more quietly, “I mean … see you?” – so horny.” The writer of the column, Helen Fielding, had already published one novel, Cause Celeb, but it was Bridget—a worrier, a charmer, an expert at having a good time—who would make Fielding famous. The diaristic column, published anonymously at first, was a smash hit. Readers responded immediately to Fielding’s vivid portrait of single life in nineties London. Her novel Bridget Jones’s Diary—whose structure and characters were based loosely on those of Pride and Prejudice—was published less than a year after that first column, and Bridget became a kind of generational touchstone, a beloved figurehead and a lightning rod for critique. Fielding, who was thirty-seven, originally from West Yorkshire, and still working at the newspaper, meanwhile became almost as famous as a writer can get. What is so striking, reading those very first columns thirty years on, is that it’s all there, right from the beginning: the levity and humor, even the influence of Austen. (Even before Fielding named her heroine’s love interest after Mr. Darcy, Bridget was moodily watching the BBC adaptation of Persuasion and concluding that she was Anne Elliot.) We can see Bridget’s combination of self-awareness and obliviousness, her cheerful resignation about the possibility of behaving like an idiot again sometime soon. Her voice is so instantly recognizable that one might forget that she didn’t always exist, that Fielding made her up, one day in the nineties. I caught up with Fielding about her writing life and the years since those early columns. She has gone on to write four more books—three more Bridget Jones novels and one standalone spy novel—and to work on the wildly popular film adaptations. Over Zoom, we talked about the role Austen has played in her work, her penchant for and methods of social observation, and what it’s like to have an alter ego. She is thoughtful and funny, with a finely tuned sense of the absurd. INTERVIEWER Did you always know that you were going to be a writer? HELEN FIELDING Words were the thing felt I had a facility with. I knew what to do with them, which I didn’t feel with a lot of other things—cooking, driving, anything practical, I wasn’t very good at. But I always wrote, starting when I was very small. I remember I put the word immobilized in an essay and a teacher at school wrote, “Whose word is this?”—implying that my parents had done my homework. I used to read a lot. Just anything. I liked words and all my family were all very funny, so we were always fooling around and making jokes. I grew up in the industrial north, it was quite sooty and dark. I’d read Jackie Collins and think, Oh, if I was a writer, I could have a swimming pool and be free and not have to go to work and I could go live somewhere hot. INTERVIEWER How do you write? Do you write every day? FIELDING I will if I’m in full-on mode. With a novel, there are some phases where you’re just thinking and gathering material and then it’ll get a momentum. I tend to do an old-fashioned working day, about ten till six. I don’t work in the evenings, and I don’t work on the weekends, so my mind knows, Okay, it’s time to do the writing now. When you get deep into a novel, into a flow state, it’s really nice and you don’t want to stop doing it. But before you get to that point, it’s harder. I always feel a bit unsettled if I’m not writing regularly—it’s like I haven’t got my handbag or something. Read More