The prolific London-born writer sits down with Ben to discuss his process, style, and latest collection, It's Beginning To Hurt.

The award winning author discusses the influence and process behind American Salvage, anachronisms, and her days in the circus.

Jessica Johnson We left a day before my 17th birthday, just when the sun began pumping hazy orange light into a humid Friday morning. Mom was rushing from one room to another, making sure we didn’t forget any small toys or dishcloths, while Dad and I stuffed our sleeping bags into the U-Haul and Keith hunted for our cat. An hour later I sat behind the passenger seat, knees curled over a laptop case and one foot jacked high on a plastic...

Thomas Matlack Thomas Matlack was Chief Financial Officer of The Providence Journal until 1997. He was the lead investor in the Art Technology Group, which reached $5 billion in market capitalization in 2001. He founded and ran his own venture firm from 1998 to 2010, before turning to writing. He is the founder of The Good Men Project. ___________________________ I happened to meet a major vendor of Verizon’s new FiOS effort at a...

Perle Besserman “Rosie had in fact approached the bar, placed one purple-veined elephant leg on the brass rail, and was preparing to launch one of her unsolicited performances.” The doctors in Mexico City learned early not to cry. Sergio, a visiting surgery fellow in our Roosevelt Hospital residency training program, would describe the operations he’d performed in cemeteries without so much as a catch in his voice; and his...

Deeply personal and insightfully written, Patti Smith’s New York story delivers the emotional narrative that Bob Dylan’s Chronicles left readers wanting. Tracing the relationship between Smith and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids explores the thriving artistic community of New York in the 60’s and 70’s and paints a portrait...

Ryan McCarl It began, to pick an arbitrary beginning, with a key that would not turn in a lock. I hauled my first load of bags and boxes into a Mass Ave complex, struggling through two heavy gates with my car against the curb. Up a slow, sweating elevator, and I gratefully dropped everything in the hallway, inserted the key, and turned – and nothing happened. A half-hour of phone calls later it came to light that the place for which I...

Marcos Soriano Cradled within his palm, slightly brighter in color than the pink of his skin, was a single pill. Roughly triangular in shape, and no larger than a child’s first tooth, the pill had cost him more than the equivalent of a year’s lease on his Volvo V70. It was love itself. He’d spent more than three weeks searching for it. He’d met with strangers in dark alleyways and the backs of booming clubs. He’d paid dearly...

Marcos Soriano “Teach me how to pray,” she says, and gets down on her knees. Becky Sims, a wispy, straw-haired freshman. Eyes blackened with mascara, a wash of rouge painted over blemished skin. You’ve only seen her once before, in the first meeting of your “Mystery of God” course. Now she kneels in front of you, barely a breath away, on the Persian rug that covers your office floor. The resource bookshelf looms at...

John Hemingway I was reading a novel about every three or four days in the beginning and if I had any time between lessons I’d spend it at the Feltrinelli near the Scala. They had a good selection of American and English titles and as I bounced from stories as different as Endo’s The Sea and Poison to Coezee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, I found that my tastes in literature were divided into two camps: the authors whose pessimistic...