Steven Cordova

It’s something of a cliché to refer to a novel as much-anticipated, probably because the phrase is too often used to refer to a novel that isn’t much, if at all, anticipated, or maybe because once read, the work disappoints. But History of Violence, Édouard Louis’s followup to his very well-received first novel, The End of Eddy, truly is much anticipated. And despite subject matter that could easily have ended up being sensationalist, self-involved, or mawkish, History of Violence doesn’t disappoint. In writing an “autofictional” account of how he was raped and almost murdered in his apartment by a trick he brought home one […]

 “Imagine Me Gone is the most personal book I’ve written, since I used the fact there is mental illness in my own family more directly than I have in anything else.” To sum up Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown and Company ) as a novel about an affluent family’s struggle with mental illness is to make it sound far more predictable than it actually is. With this novel of familial strife, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominee Adam Haslett moves beyond cliché and immerses Imagine Me Gone in contemporary ideas about racial and economic justice in America—he does so […]

To sum up Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown) as a novel about an affluent family’s struggle with mental illness is to make it sound far more predictable than it actually is. With this novel of familial strife, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominee Adam Haslett moves beyond cliché and immerses Imagine Me Gone in contemporary ideas about racial and economic justice in America—he does so by having each of the five family members serve as alternating narrators. Even the family’s most conventional character—Margaret, the much-burdened matriarch—asserts, “I’m not a doll in the house of my mother’s imaginings. I got […]

It’s not easy to have a tête-à-tête with writer Garth Greenwell. Not because his growing list of successes—articles in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and a short story in The Paris Review—have gone to head. On the contrary, he’s as warm and lighthearted as he is pensive. No, the only reason it’s hard to have a sit down with Garth is because, at the time of this interview, he is living far away in Bulgaria. He was, however, in New York City during November 2015, and we took advantage of the situation to discuss his much anticipated debut novel, […]