I met ZZ Packer last night before her reading at the “5 Under 35” National Book Foundation event. She radiated warmth and good humor, so I decided to push my luck. “Is it stressful to talk about how your novel‘s going?” I asked her. She smiled. “Oh, it’s stressful,” she told me. But when I tried to retract the question, . . .
Geoffrey Philp interviews Jamaican writer Marlon James, whose John Crow’s Devil (“a powerful first novel” about a preacher and a modern-day apostle “driven not by faith but by guilt, in both cases guilt driven by sexual transgressions,” according to the NYTBR) I’ve intended to read for the past year. The interview — and James’ praise for Wide Sargasso Sea — . . .