“From 1997 to 2007, we lived in the small city of Strasbourg in eastern France… During those ten years, I did several notable things: I, with my husband, brought our two daughters through infancy; I began my debut novel, An Unexpected Guest; and I learned to listen to French pop music.” I created a playlist…(Read More)
“[U]sing foreign words is a slippery slope. Creating a sense of place is one thing, but you don’t want to drive readers crazy with incomprehensible phrases or dialect. You want the language to work for the story and not against it.” Some readers are instantly uncomfortable when they encounter unfamiliar words in a…(Read More)
“It was the image of this tiny but indomitable twosome, neither of whom had contracted AIDS, that stayed with me. Every morning the nine-year-old girl would lead her baby brother to the treacherous coltan mines, where he’d work for hours at a stretch running his small hands through mud, searching for colombo…(Read More)
“I’d use the hours on the train to twist and turn our relationship over in my head, bending and inverting it, hoping to end up with a shape I could understand. I knew that an intelligent, liberated woman like myself was supposed to expect more from a relationship, but I couldn’t stop waxing…(Read More)
“I put off reading my own work to an audience for years. I worked as a non-fiction writer for newspapers and magazines before publishing fiction and, as far as I was concerned, one of the perks was the ability to communicate while remaining invisible.” For author David Abram’s fun series “My First Time…(Read More)
