Blog / Interviews

10 Questions for Sabina Murray

August 26, 2024 - By Brooke Chandler

No form of art can express a life quite like the novel. No art form charts the lives of individuals—encounters, challenges, and relationships—as successfully as the book-length work of fiction. Perhaps this is because of the amount of detail provided for characters and their situations, which allows us to truly experience as they do, but beyond this, the living quality of novels is best understood by considering time: the time we take to read, but also the manipulation of time upon the page. All readers casually understand this, but it is worth looking at a few scientific concepts, in particular some properties of time, to better comprehend how it works.
—from Sabina Murray's "The Order of the Novel,...

10 Questions for Johanna Bishop

August 20, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

Profile of a solitary man, in shirt sleeves, whose pose of
sharpening a blade suggests he is a knife grinder. Often
called The Spy, since he seems to be listening to some-
thing attentively, it is thought to depict the man who
discovered the Catiline conspiracy; at other times of day
he appears to be Cincinnatus, at still others Manlius Capi-
tolinus.
—from Andrea Inglese's "Five Visions From The Big Duck," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
I suppose I translated a few poems and songs from French and Italian as a teenager—recently, an old friend even dug up a Natalia Ginzburg essay that we had the youthful hubris to tackle over a...

From Below the Earth and Across the Sea:

The Chthonic Choreography of Emma Cianchi

August 15, 2024 - By Anna Botta and Jim Hicks, with Emma Cianchi and Caterina Giangrasso Angrisani

Editor’s note: As will be clear, the following conversation with the Massachusetts Review’s Executive Editor, Jim Hicks, and the co-editor of our “Mediterraneans” issue, Anna Botta, was conducted just hours before the première of the choreographer Emma Cianchi and ArtGarageDanceCompany’s new performance, The Sea that Unites Us. After the dance that evening, the choreographer told the audience more about her inspiration. She commented, “When I came here, I had the idea of working on the theme of the journey. When I got to Jacob’s Pillow, however, I immediately felt that I also needed to bring something here from my land, which is rich in mythology. And I thought of the legends of female figures present in the story of...

10 Questions for Ryan Choi

August 12, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

As the sharpened sword beheads the two-headed
               serpent,
I shun the crude laughter and gossip of the mortal
               world.
Thousands of autumns of virtue and vice are buried
               in the yellow of the earth,
Under the sunny skies that forever shine on good
               and evil the same.
The slightest breeze rumples the moon’s portrait on
               the lake,
The faintest drizzle snatches the blooming flowers
               from their branches.
...

10 Questions for Will Howard

August 5, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

We always wanted to have a bar.
We always wanted to have a music bar.
We always wanted to have a music bar and call it “The 67”
and fill it with album covers
from that oh-so-glorious year
for western pop music,
call it “The 67” and put it on an enormous sign
next to Warhol’s banana.
—from Pablo Texón's "The 67," Volume 65, Issue 1 (Spring 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
When I was in high school, I translated an excerpt of Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus in an English class. I’m sure my translation was awful, but I enjoyed the part of the assignment where we had to write a one-page reflection on the...