ARCHIVE FOR Alison Murphy

Alison Murphy interviews author Matthew Salesses about his new book, Craft in the Real World. You can learn more about and purchase Craft in the Real World here. 

After four years of serving as the founding instructor of GrubStreet’s Memoir Incubator, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is set to launch their memoir, The Fact of a Body, tomorrow (May 16th) at Harvard Book Store

Clint Smith III began writing his poetry collection, Counting Descent, in August 2014, shortly after Mike Brown was killed and the protests that started in Ferguson began to spread into a nationwide movement. Since then, he has been named the 2014 National Poetry Slam fellow, given two TED Talks that have been viewed collectively over five million times, and been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Guardian, and Boston Review, among others

"Art could not be separated from politics, and politics needed art in order to reach the people where they lived, through entertaining them." 

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer is that rare example of a book that manages to be many things at one time, and to do so almost flawlessly: it is at once a spy novel, a political satire, a gripping account of an oft-misunderstood war, and a meditation on the nature of what identity means when your identities are in conflict.

The titular sympathizer is a man without a country, made up of conflicting identities and political loyalties. …

 In a freak basketball accident during his junior year at Harvard, Howard Axelrod was left permanently blinded in his right eye. His new memoir, The Point of Vanishing (Beacon, 2015), tells the story of how that accident (and one doomed love story) led him to a two-year pilgrimage in the Vermont woods. Disconnected from the distractions of the modern world, Axelrod re-learned what it meant to see. We caught up with Howard to talk about his experience, how to write quietly in a noisy world, and what he has in common with the Unabomber.