Interviews
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8 Questions For... Mary Gaitskill August 15, 2024
Mary Gaitskill posts on such disparate subjects as literature, incel phenomenon, pole dancing and AI. She talks to writers and other people trying to figure things out. Her publication is Out of It....
Shannon Sharpe Is One of the Best Worst Interviewers August 15, 2024
At the internet’s most elite club, there’s no bouncer, no VIP list, no line of twentysomething hopefuls looking for a good night out on the dime of strangers who might offer to buy them drinks. Instead, there are matching brown leather tufted chaise ...
How to Respond to Tradwife Envy August 15, 2024
Recently a number of hit pieces and critiques of the cultural phenomenon known as “tradwives” seem to suggest that progressive feminists are beginning to have a change of heart. Although their stated intention is to detract from the phenomenon, the ...
Joy Williams and the Wildest Decades of Her Life August 14, 2024
Here at Esquire, writers are the backbone of our magazine. But while some contribute stories just once or twice, others journey with us for decades, becoming downright intertwined with our history. Joy Williams is one such writer....
How Helen Phillips Wrote Hum August 14, 2024
On a semi-regular basis, I interview authors about their writing processes and craft practices. You can find previous entries here. For this entry I talked to Helen Phillips, whose excellent new novel Hum came out last week. Similar to Phillips’s pre...
Five Letters from Seamus Heaney August 13, 2024
The following five letters were written by the poet Seamus Heaney, all in the spring of 1995. The Paris Review’s interview with Heaney, referenced in his letter to Henri Cole, is available here; two of his poems appeared in the magazine in 1979....
Our Vanishing Internet: An Interview with Dr. Larry Sanger August 12, 2024
Millennials were raised to fear the internet’s permanence, which evolved into a kind of truism after Facebook: think before you share, or forty years from now we’ll all be talking about those drunk photos at your Supreme Court hearing. Our assumption...
Reintroducing T.J. Newman August 09, 2024
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or you haven’t been to an airport bookstore in the past three years, you’ve probably heard of literary wunderkind T.J. Newman. A former flight attendant, Newman started scribbling down ideas for thriller novels...
The Oddball 1979 Novel Having A Summer Renaissance August 09, 2024
According to my feed, the book of the summer is a tie between Miranda July’s sexy midlife-crisis drama, All Fours; the new Sally Rooney galley; and a slim experimental novel published in 1979. Elaine Kraf’s The Princess of 72nd Street lyrically detai...
Lewis Hamilton on Winning Again August 08, 2024
Sir Lewis Hamilton is suddenly on a hot streak. In early July, the seven-time Formula 1 champion won the British Grand Prix for the ninth time, setting a record for the most victories by a driver at a single circuit. It was just the latest milestone ...
Writing For, Within, and Against the Market August 06, 2024
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the market. Or rather, the author’s relationship to it. This was spurred by Christian Lorentzen’s excellent essay “Literature Without Literature” that was critiquing Dan Sinykin’s also excellent book Big Fiction. I ...
The Real Fiction is Life: An Interview with James Purdy August 06, 2024
I was just coming off a long and feverish James Purdy binge in 1986 when his latest book, In the Hollow of His Hand, was published. It seemed the ideal opportunity to catch up with one of America’s most eccentric and compulsive writers–the subject of...
Listening to Elizabeth Taylor August 02, 2024
The art of storytelling is the art of simplification—of giving smooth contours and sharp points to messily loose-ended incidents. That’s why, when artists tell their life stories, the plethora of factual details is secondary to the emotions, the idea...
Artists Talking June 27, 2023
Dirt is a daily(ish) newsletter about the cutting edge of digital pop culture. Every week we send out multiple insightful short essays on topics like streaming, TikTok, video games, and web3, from a rotating group of critics....
Taylor Sheridan Does Whatever He Wants June 23, 2023
“They’re scared,” says Taylor Sheridan, looking amused as he steps onto his porch and away from a gaggle of publicists huddled inside his house. “They’re scared of what I might say.”With good reason. The Yellowstone showrunner — who’s gone from an ob...
'Midjourney Magazine' Is Here—and It’s Soulless June 22, 2023
Midjourney Magazine has landed. The publication, a collection of thousands of AI-generated images as well as "interviews with Midjourney community members," dropped its second issue this past week....
The Secret of Liz Phair June 21, 2023
In 1992 and 1993, an unknown singer-songwriter named Liz Phair recorded her debut album in Chicago, not knowing that it would become one of the most influential records of the decade. Exile in Guyville hit the music scene with the stiff, stinging rus...
An Interview with Sophie Hughes June 16, 2023
This Is Not Miami is Fernanda Melchor’s newly translated collection of cronicás or, as she put it in the author’s note, relatos exploring the underbelly of Veracruz, where readers are forced to directly confront the psyches of disturbingly sympatheti...
Ian Penman on Freud, Foucault, and Fassbinder June 16, 2023
It was late 1976 or early 1977 when a teenage Ian Penman committed the crime that marked him out as a born magazine writer. It was after the Sex Pistols played the Chalet du Lac in Paris, but before the Red Army Faction killed that federal prosecutor...
Cormac McCarthy’s Narrative Wisdom June 15, 2023
The act of writing was its own reward for McCarthy. In a long career, he gave few interviews, and rarely explained himself. He didn’t make himself known. I can’t say that I love everything he wrote. Sometimes, when his prose enters the Biblical regis...
Can Fraternities Save America? June 14, 2023
Dr. Anthony Bradley is on a quest to make fraternities virtuous again. “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever done,” he tells me. “I’m essentially bailing out water on the sinking Titanic.” The problem he’s confronting is well engrained in American cu...
Cormac McCarthy Is Dead at 89 June 14, 2023
Cormac McCarthy, the formidable and reclusive writer of Appalachia and the American Southwest, whose raggedly ornate early novels about misfits and grotesques gave way to the lush taciturnity of “All the Pretty Horses” and the apocalyptic minimalism ...
The Immortal Mel Brooks June 12, 2023
I’m always looking for a way to get near Mel Brooks. Can you blame me? He has acted in, directed, produced, and written some of the most memorable films in human history—among them The Producers, Blazing Saddles, History of the World, Part I, and Spa...
How Richard Hell Found His Vocation June 08, 2023
In 1974, when he was in his early twenties and living in downtown Manhattan, Richard Hell, born Richard Meyers, founded the band Television with his high-school friend Tom Verlaine. After an acrimonious split with Verlaine, Hell left the group and cr...
How Marvel Swallowed Hollywood June 06, 2023
Growing up in Missouri, Christopher Yost had boxes of Marvel comic books, which his mother bought at the grocery store. None of his friends read Marvel; it was his own private world, a “sprawling story where all these characters lived in this univers...
