Late one evening early in October, I struggled to fall asleep. The sheets scratched, the cats in the empty lot next door screeched. These small irritations distracted me from sleep just long enough for all the big, looming concerns to descend. The presidency, the planet. Those who have wronged me and those whom I have wronged. Nothing, it seemed, could put my mind at rest.

Carmen Maria Machado might seem a strange companion for such a night. Her debut collection, ​Her Body and Other Parties​, conveyed the horrors of living in the world and inhabiting a body so vividly that it made her a finalist for the National Book Award. She is not a writer who will sing you to sleep. When I picked up her new book, In the Dream House, I was hoping, instead, for someone to sit with me in the dark of the night.​ ​I turned the final page just as the birds outside my window began to chirp.

In the Dream House ​is billed as a memoir, but the word hardly captures the variety within its pages. The book is centered around the narrative of an abusive relationship, and each chapter offers a new, illuminating metaphor: “​Dream Hous​e as Omen,” “​Dream House ​as Lost in Translation,” “​Dream House ​as Exercise in Style.” These riveting fragments weave together folklore, fiction, and scholarship on queer domestic abuse. This book is bold yet nuanced, expansive yet specific. And perhaps most of all, it is an utterance that emerges from within deafening silence. That tells a story which has yet to be heard.

Machado and I spoke over the phone a few weeks ago. Even after a long day of teaching, she was a lively and generous interlocutor. Her frank speech carries a sort of bracing wakefulness, similar to how I felt that early morning—eager for the light of yet another perilous day.

INTERVIEWER

You write in the prologue about Saidiya Hartman’s concept of archival silence, how some stories are “missing from our collective histories.” What is it like to write from within this silence? To tell a story that has a history, but which has not been entered into the collective archive because it is a queer history?

MACHADO

It’s very lonely. It’s lonely and strange and special. I wish I had a more exciting answer. It’s really hard. Of course, I worry about what I missed and I worry about how the book has failed and it gives me a lot of anxiety. It’s a very stressful place to be in.

INTERVIEWER

I imagine. If you fear you failed at something, what is it that you were hoping to achieve? I’d love, also, to hear more about your research process.

MACHADO

When I first sold the book to Graywolf, it was mostly just the memoir pieces. I knew I wanted to do a heavy research element, but I didn’t know what exactly. And when I began my rewrites, I was looking for the history of the way we’ve talked about queer domestic violence. I was also looking for places where this conversation existed, but where it wouldn’t necessarily have been called that. The former part was a little easier. I managed to trace, as you saw in the book, this timeline of the way that the conversation evolved and devolved and moved in interesting ways within the community in the eighties and nineties, and into today.

But the latter part was much harder. I found myself researching a lot of woman-on-woman violence. As I was researching, it seemed people would really notice only when the violence was really salacious, like when one girl killed another and people would say: Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness, what is that all about?

I kept thinking about how many things happen behind closed doors. Domestic violence almost by definition happens in the home, and so you’re always reading between the lines. I’m not a professional historian, so it was difficult. This is not my area of expertise. But I wanted to create some context because just saying, This happened to me, wasn’t good enough. I wanted to try and figure out the framework around this thing that happened to me. How can I understand it as not just a thing that happened to me, a discrete thing, but also in the context of history and in queer history, and in the history of gender?

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In January 2016, Dan Piepenbring—then The Paris Review’s online editor—was offered an opportunity to collaborate on a book with the artist Prince Rogers Nelson, known variously throughout his career as The Kid, The Artist, The Purple One, The Prince of Funk, Joey Coco, Alexander Nevermind, an unpronounceable symbol, or, simply, Prince. Yes, that Prince. Purple Rain Prince. “Act your age, not your shoe size” Prince. Prince Prince.

The famously enigmatic musician, then in his late fifties, was grappling with how to reveal more of himself and his ideas to the world. He wanted to write a memoir about the music industry, about his childhood, about his experience as an African American artist. With Dan’s encouragement, Prince began putting his thoughts on paper. Like his music, Prince’s prose was lyrical and unexpected, reflecting his singular voice and a unique sensitivity for narrative. Even in its nascent form, the book promised to be extraordinary. But, just a few months into the project, Prince died unexpectedly, leaving the fate of the memoir uncertain.

Grief-stricken and reeling, Piepenbring and his editors at Random House moved forward with the book—transcribing Prince’s handwritten drafts and curating them with a selection of photographs, lyric sheets, and other ephemera collected from his estate. Introducing the book is an essay by Piepenbring that details the unlikely story of their profound, if short-lived, collaboration.

Like much of Prince’s oeuvre, The Beautiful Ones defies traditional categorization. Part collage and part elegy, the book tells a fragmented story of the musician’s young life beginning with his very first memory (his mother’s eyes) and continuing through the early days of his career. In it, Prince writes with candor about his epilepsy, his first kiss, his parents’ separation, and his rise to fame. 

Much of Prince’s story is told through miscellanea: childhood photographs, a middle school report card, his first check from Warner Brothers. Particularly poignant are the excerpts from a seventies scrapbook recounting when, at the age of 19, Prince first moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in music. The photographs, accompanied by handwritten notes (“My first car!” “A crazy snapshot of me!”) capture the hopeful excitement of a young man in the foothills of stardom. What emerges from all of this is a richly textured and intimate portrait of one of the most mysterious pop-cultural icons of the last century.

My interview with Dan took place earlier this fall at a cafe near The Paris Review office. 

INTERVIEWER 

I want to start by asking a little bit about your relationship to Prince’s music. How old were you when you started listening to him seriously?

PIEPENBRING

I have a vivid memory of the first time I encountered one of his albums. It was at a Walmart in Hunt Valley, Maryland in 1999. This is embarrassing to admit but, at the time, I was really into nu metal—Korn and Limp Bizkit and other thirteen-year-old-boy stuff. I would go to Walmart, because they sold censored versions, which were the only ones my mom would let me buy. I remember browsing the shelves and coming across the cover of Prince’s record Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic. He was going under his unpronounceable symbol at the time. If memory serves, he’s on the cover wearing a blue vinyl outfit with a kind of sparkly texture. It’s skin-tight. It looks very extraterrestrial, very Y2K. And he’s giving this imperious, sultry, mysterious look to the camera. I was utterly drawn in.

But I didn’t really go deep into his music until I got to college. Someone in my dorm, from California, had seen him on the Musicology tour and was raving about it saying, If you’re not into Prince, you don’t know what you’re talking about—in the way that eighteen-year-old boys can just throw the gauntlet down with some critical bullshit. So, I started getting my hands on all the Prince I could. and really became obsessed. By the end of freshman year I had amassed his whole discography and was steeping myself in it, listening to it all the time, forcing it on friends. I was a goner.  Read More

Kaveh Akbar, left, and Leslie Jamison, right.

Leslie Jamison makes her life more difficult than it needs to be. In her most recent essay collection, Make it Scream, Make it Burn, the subjects she chooses—the world’s loneliest whale, Second Life devotees, the Museum of Broken Relationships in Croatia—could carry the pieces with their propulsive novelty alone. Certainly, Jamison is brilliant enough as a sculptor of language that we’d happily oblige her. But what makes Jamison one of the essential essayists of our generation is her rigor. She renders her subjects, the world that made them, and her own gaze all within the same frame. In each of these essays, there is the subject, but there is also the long history leading up to it, and then there is also Jamison herself, observing and writing. So should we call her new book journalism? Or literary criticism? Or memoir? Yes. For an imagination, a curiosity, as expansive as Jamison’s, there can be no partitions. Her writing, like her mind in this conversation, leaps freely between each world.

AKBAR

Can we begin by talking about grace? One of the things I’m most drawn to in the book, and in your work more broadly, is the steady orbit you make around the idea of grace. There’s a moment in one of the early essays in this collection where you crystallize it, writing: “The definition of grace is that it’s not deserved.” I have been grappling with this idea in my own life, the notion that if I’m capable of doling out grace only to those obviously deserving of it, it isn’t grace exactly. It’s kindness or it’s pity or it’s maybe even just propriety. What is grace to you? And what can it do?

JAMISON

Starting with grace is like diving into the deep end of the swimming pool—so much better than slowly lowering each inch of thigh down the steps in the shallow end. Or maybe it’s really like diving into the deep end of an infinity pool, where you come up to the edge and see that below is a more infinite body of water than the one you’re swimming in. Which is part of what grace means to me, you feel the world get larger around you, feel yourself get smaller within it. And the world can get large around you in so many ways. As a bespoke digital wonderland, as the infinite hall of mirrors of your prior lives, as a big blue whale large enough to swallow us all. All of these things—mythic whales, past lives, digital waterslides—can be sources of grace. The vending machine of grace is vast and it never gives you exactly what you asked for. And that means we have to pay attention, because we’re not always aware that grace has arrived. As you wrote, “I live in the gulf / between what I’ve been given / and what I’ve received.”

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Kevin Barry is widely recognized as one of the most gifted fiction writers to emerge from the English-speaking world in the new century. Five years ago, a critic in the Montreal Gazette spoke of a growing view that in him, “an heir to the great Irish tradition has arrived.” But Barry’s early life was spent in multiple countries and continents—he grew up in Limerick city, spent a decade in Cork city, then lived in various places in England, Scotland, Canada, the U.S., and Spain. His first story collection, There are Little Kingdoms, won the prestigious Rooney Prize when it was published twelve years ago, and his first novel, City of Bohane, won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2011. Now, his most recent novel, Night Boat to Tangier, has been long-listed for the Booker Prize. He is known for a distinctive combination of earthy wordplay and taut narration, humor and darkness. We conducted our interview via email, over the span of a few days.

INTERVIEWER

I wanted to start by asking you about where you live in the northern part of Ireland. How did you choose it? And what is it like there, in the town where you live?

BARRY

I live beside Lough Arrow in County Sligo, an area that at one time had the highest incidence of reported UFO sightings in Europe. Then a certain old lady passed on—to another dimension—and the sightings somehow dropped off. But I watch the skies, just in case.

I’ve lived here with my wife for the last twelve years. It’s essentially a swamp, with rain three hundred days a year, but it’s a very lovely place. Kind of dreamy, kind of melancholic, but beautiful. The house was built in the 1840s as a barracks for the Royal Irish Constabulary and remained a cop shop until the late seventies. I work out the back in a shed that was once a holding cell.

Living in the countryside took getting used to—the sheer dark at night, the mystery rustlings from the ditches as animals molest each other, et cetera—but I’m totally into it now. It’s kind of spacey and weird and you discover how affected you are, mood-wise, by weather and atmospheric pressure and presences in the landscape.

INTERVIEWER

Will you tell me about your wife? What’s her name, and how long have you been married, and what does she do?

BARRY

Olivia Smith. We’ve been together twenty years and married ten. She used to be an academic, teaching law, but now runs a publishing project that we work on together, Winter Papers, a fancy annual arts anthology. She spends a lot of time helping me find my phone, keys, wallet, sense of decorum. She generally keeps the circus on the road. V.S. Pritchett’s wife used to list her occupation on official forms as “driver” because she had to chauffeur him around all the time. Liv does a lot of that, too. I sit my driving test tomorrow at the age of fifty, and it’s looking touch-and-go.

INTERVIEWER

What kept you from learning to drive, or from getting your license?

BARRY

I think it’s genetic—my late father passed his test at something like the eighth attempt, in his midforties. I’m a slow starter generally. I learned to cycle a bike at the age of fourteen and to swim at the age of thirty-two and I published a first slim volume of stories at the age of thirty-seven. Only fools rush in. I’m now an avid cyclist and swimmer and story writer. Once I get going, I tend to have the zeal of a late convert.

INTERVIEWER

You were obviously a passionate reader during those first thirty-seven years. Were your parents bookish people?

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Jesse Ball (Photo: Joe Lieske)

Jesse Ball is an absurdist writer. His latest work, The Divers’ Game, set in a world much like our own, examines what happens when the lives of others are seen as disposable and small measures of kindness are largely absent. In other words, The Divers’ Game is a meditation on violence, longing, cruelty, pageantry, and joy. It’s made up of four sections, and filled with despair and stark beauty, written by one of the finest writers and humans I’ve had the great fortune to encounter in this frequently calamitous world.

I first met Jesse in Chicago in 2010. I was beginning graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches, and I wanted to work with him. I remember we had meetings every other week in which we would sit in a conference room with corporate furniture. Each time, upon entering that sad little room, I felt as if I were visiting a wizened old monk at the top of an arduous hill. A couple months ago, when I proposed this conversation, I was hopeful we could meet to go bowling or gambling or shopping for artisanal hats, but owing to our different time zones, this interview was conducted by email.

INTERVIEWER

Where are you right now?

BALL

In Shanghai. I am in a hotel in the city center. I’m seated in the dining area. It’s six A.M. No one but me has yet come down for breakfast. All the breakfast attendants are here, but other than that, I’m alone. They are all very busy and I am answering your questions on a small sheet of paper.

A man in a paper chef’s hat is very rapidly making a great pile of fried eggs. I am not sure when or whether he’ll stop. I have on my plate two slices of watermelon, some tofu, bitter melon, and a red bean roll. I was drinking tea but it’s all gone.

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Kimberly King Parsons is a writer who lives in the wilderness. When we spoke on the phone, we were interrupted by the cawing of a large bird outside the window of her Oregon home, which sits on a hill surrounded by a forest populated with “loud squirrels, loud birds, and voles.” She grew up in Lubbock, Texas, with generations of ancestors rooted in the nearby cities of Quitaque and Turkey, where unsettled land stretches endlessly. She would pass the time by walking miles in any direction.

Wildness is in her fiction as well; the story “Fiddlebacks” begins with three children shaking out their shoes before putting them on, expelling poisonous insects hidden in the toes. There is also something untamed in her deeply flawed characters, who are constantly caught between reining themselves in and indulging their feral darkness. However, Parsons’s true gift is couching the savage in the great beauty of her prose. Her story “Foxes” appears in The Paris Review’s Summer 2019 issue, and her debut collection, Black Light, was published this month. Our conversation revealed her to be an exacting craftswoman, someone for whom the articulation of each sentence is an act of listening to the character and knowing just when to leave a story.

INTERVIEWER

Have you always known you would be a writer?

PARSONS

I grew up an only child, so I used to really love going to birthday parties or hanging out with groups, and at a certain point my role became designated scary-story teller. I don’t know why they chose me, but I loved it. There’s something about having a captive audience and having a room full of terrified people listening to you. I remember knowing that I wanted to be a storyteller or a writer in some way.

INTERVIEWER

Do you remember some of the scary stories you used to tell?

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