The winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, Soyinka is coming out with his first novel in almost 50 years, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth.

“The library was practically a babysitter. You could leave yourself and enter worlds. It’s such a rich life when you get to be a reader. Books can give you multiple lives.”

I went home and wrote my first real short story in a furious rage.

The Vixen makes an implicit argument for good writing, and even good editing, as a form of political defiance.

What did it feel like to be these people in this time in history? The power of imagination is very strong. I’ve written my own story, sourced it from the air. I wanted to immerse readers in that world, rural Georgia in 1865.

I also tend to write about eccentrics. I’m interested in people who are different because of pure bloody-mindedness. People who do not feel obliged to conform. I’m interested in people who are emotionally different.

To make art, you’ve got to be in a very precarious place all the time. You really have to realize that it’s a dangerous thing you’re doing, and the stakes are very high.

Right then, Shipstead recalls, “I decided to write about a female aviator.” The adapted quote became the first line of Great Circle: “I was born to be a wanderer.”

As she wrote Summerwater, Moss was thinking about the attitudes about public space that emerge in moments of popular nationalism such as Brexit.

Much of the change that needs to occur in American publishing needs to happen on the masthead front. The whole thing needs an overhaul, but I’m thinking about lasting, substantial, generational change.

When I wrote this book, I had the ambitious idea of combining all these different threads I was obsessed with: Cuba, America, detention, deportation, addiction, privilege.

I’d like to go back to Raymundo Mata and look at it again, because of the fake news shit that’s going on right now—to reflect on what this metatextuality means.

The sort of realism that I’ve practiced in the past isn’t adequate to the times we’re in.

Inside Story contains wonderful considerations of what it is to be a writer, the importance of reading while writing, and writing while reading. It offers, in a way, what Amis’s parents gave him: an insight into the lives of writers.