Photographer Stephanie Keith has a sharp eye, a frank and unpretentious manner, and a vigorous, roving curiosity. For the past several years, she’s been documenting Voodoo ceremonies in Brooklyn’s Haitian community. Her early work in this area (captured in a 2007 NPR slideshow from which the image above was taken) centered on a priest Keith trailed, at his invitation. When . . .
Sometimes I write little draft pieces of my novel on my phone while commuting, but Peter Brett composed a whole book this way.
“There is so much wrong with Philip Jones’s ‘English writers outperform rivals’ post,” but let’s start with the title.
At one of our first dinners — or was it during a marathon phone conversation? — I discovered that Marie Mockett shares my admiration for Colson Whitehead’s work. I figured readers of this site would enjoy someone else’s perspective on his writing for a change, so I invited her to interview the author (who’s become a friend) about his new . . .
My brief appreciation of Frederick Barthelme’s Waveland is up at NPR. The novel, his twelfth work of fiction, obliquely parallels the fate of the [Mississippi Gulf Coast] town of its title. “Even before Katrina,” he writes, “when Waveland was all there, it wasn’t a high-toned beach town; it was more like 10 miles of down-on-its-luck trailer park. After the storm, . . .