“On Reading Every Unread Book On My Bookshelf During the Pandemic,” for LitHub — July 2020
“A Story of Two Doctors, and a Secret Between Them,” review for The New York Times, 2018
Interview with Ann Beattie, Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art — May 2014
“People are not looking for an Ann Beattie story the way they were in 1979,” Ann Beattie told me when I spoke with her in July. “Absolutely not. No one."
Buy the issue here: http://columbiajournal.org/print/issue-52/
"In Another Kind of Battle: Rereading Henry Bromell," The Los Angeles Review of Books - September 2013.
"But whatever your stance on seeking the author’s biography in his or her fiction — some abhor it, while some find it inevitable — it seems safe to say that Bromell fixated on the Richardsons/Hoopers, archetypal Americans of the 1950s made exotic and even bizarre by the choices of their patriarchs, in part so that he might relitigate the secrecy and lies of his own rootless childhood. How can you tell when a professional liar is telling the truth? And what if that liar, that “spook,” is your father?"
Read it here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/in-another-kind-of-battle-rereading-henry-bromell/
The Rumpus Interview: Said Sayrafiezadeh, The Rumpus - September 2013
"But it’s hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from—imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows… I think I’m writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I’m really writing about myself."
Read it here: http://therumpus.net/2013/09/the-rumpus-interview-with-said-sayrafiezadeh/
On All the Living by C.E. Morgan, Tin House - April 2013
"If we can all agree that it's a struggle to write well about sex, or about God, then we'd all do well to spend some time with C.E. Morgan's novel, one of the most astonishing fiction debuts of recent years."
Read it here: https://tinhouse.com/on-all-the-living-by-c-e-morgan/