Category Archives: Author Interviews
Global Challenges in Environmental Humanities
What is the Global Challenges in Environmental Humanities series about? By global challenges we mean threats to the biosphere occurring at planetary, pan-continental or trans-oceanic scales. These include biodiversity loss, unsustainable economic and social changes in landscape, or the diverse impacts of climate change on cultural memory and socio-environmental futures – these are among the many risks and vulnerabilities implicated in the latest IPCC reports. Such challenges also include gradually unfolding disasters that are less spectacular, such as disease, nutritional deficiencies or other forms of ill health that stretch over individual human life spans or even across generations, owing to many causes – toxic accumulation of waste in environments, structurally reinforced poverty, environmental racism, failed social policy, cultural inertia, corporate malfeasance and neglect.
‘I always suspected that he was more influenced by Jungian psychology than he likes to let on’: Jonathan Dil on Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami and the Search for Self-Therapy, by Jonathan Dil, is out now How would you describe your book in one sentence? This books looks at how Haruki Murakami started writing fiction as a means of self-therapy and how he transformed this therapeutic impulse into a literary career of global acclaim. What drew to you… Read More »
Why Are We Silent? #MeToo in South Asia Subcontinent and Diaspora: A Conversation
This week, in a series of blog takeovers, we’re looking at #MeToo and Literary Studies with posts from the collection’s contributors. Guest post by Somia R. Bibi and Nidhi Shrivastava In this conversation, Somia R. Bibi and Nidhi Shrivastava discuss the limitations of the #MeToo movement in the South Asian subcontinent and diaspora. In particular,… Read More »
Interview with Mikhail Epstein
The below is an interview with the author of The Phoenix of Philosophy, Mikhail Epstein. How would you describe your book in one sentence? This book is about the intellectual movements in the late Soviet Union that helped to destroy the totalitarian system built on the Marxist philosophical foundation. What drew you to writing about this subject? All existing histories of Russian and Soviet philosophy end their coverage in the mid-twentieth century, which happens… Read More »
Edwidge Danticat on Diaspora and Identity
The Haitian diaspora today, in my view, is very big and complex. You now have a lot of Haitian-born millennials who are adding another very important layer to the conversation. Some of them are in media, and what is highlighted about them is not even that they’re Haitian. They’re just out there excelling and doing their thing.
A Conversation Among Objects
Q&A with Tara Mokhtari
Tara Mokhtari answers some questions about the new edition of her book The Bloomsbury Introduction to Creative Writing. How is the The Bloomsbury Introduction to Creative Writing unique? There are two key ways in which my book is unique. The first is that the overall approach focuses on the connection between knowledge and creative writing.… Read More »
Q&A with Indrek Männiste
Indrek Männiste answers a few questions about the new edited collection D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity. How would you describe your book in one sentence? It is a book about the literary legacy of D. H. Lawrence and how he tried – throughout his life and work – cope with the emerging technological age. … Read More »
Q&A with Arka Chattopadhyay
Arka Chattopadhyay answered a few questions for us about his new book, Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real. How would you describe your book in one sentence? It is a comparatist reading of how mathematical forms operate in the literary texts of Samuel Beckett and how Lacan’s ideas of mathematical forms work… Read More »