Peter Hessler recently relocated to Cairo with his wife, journalist Leslie T. Chang, and their twin daughters. Their move Egypt came after a stint in southwestern Colorado, and before that, Hessler spent years based in and observing China. During his China period, Hessler produced books that met great success—River Town, Oracle Bones, and Country Driving—marking him as one of the US’s leading long-form journalists in the region. In 2011, he won a MacArthur “Genius” grant for his keen observation of “such rapidly changing societies as Reform Era China.” But Hessler had little desire to become a writer associated with

Peter Trachtenberg’s Another Insane Devotion: On the Love of Cats and Persons is the memoir of a cat owner impelled almost against his will (and certainly against his better judgment) to fly from North Carolina to New York in search of his missing cat. It is also an account of a dissolving marriage, and a far-flung and highly erudite meditation on the nature of love. Trachtenberg is no stranger to asking big-picture questions through seemingly small subjects. His memoir, Seven Tattoos, moved effortlessly from the death rites of the Ngaju of Borneo to the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, becoming

In Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s mammoth, six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle, the trivial and the momentous mix, change places, and push the work beyond the limits of categorization. At once a Proustian chronicle of the everyday and a latter-day account of a man’s need for, if not a room, then a few hours of his own in which to write, Knausgaard’s work—a controversial sensation in Norway—has been called “the most significant literary enterprise of our time.” In a series of generous, thoughtful e-mails—some sent from “a balcony in a hotel in Beirut,” where the writer was attending the

Mohsin Hamid published his second novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist in 2007. This year will see the release of Mira Nair’s film adaptation of that book, as well as Hamid’s follow-up novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, which NPR called a “globalized version of The Great Gatsby.” Hamid talked with us about the enduring appeal of The Reluctant Fundamentalist as well as comic books and writing in the second person. Bookforum: The Radical Fundamentalist has been used by colleges to teach diversity to incoming freshmen. What do you think it might tell us about religious fundamentalism, or

James Lasdun was born in London in 1958, the son of the prominent British architect Denys Lasdun. He made his literary debut in 1985 with the short story collection The Silver Age, and in the years since he has published three additional short-story collections, four volumes of poetry, and two novels—2002’s The Horned Man and 2005’s Seven Lies, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Lasdun moved to the United States in 1986 and has taught creative writing at Princeton, NYU, and Columbia University, among other institutions. His latest release, Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked

Even an email from Wells Tower is a crackling read. To know why, you’d have to be familiar with Tower’s magazine writing, or with Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, a collection of nine short and sometimes brutal stories that moved David Sedaris to say that Tower might “reinvent the English language.” It’s safe to bet that similar acclaim will meet Tower’s new book, which is slated for release next year. Whether Tower is depicting life with a traveling circus for the Washington Post Magazine or writing fiction from the perspective of a wounded stepchild, his voice always keeps readers in

As I’m reading my godson, Geronimo, his favorite book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, I look above my bi-focals across a cozy apartment decorated with artwork collected from all around the globe. There, in the kitchen, stands the toddler’s barefoot mother, Emily Raboteau. Her second child is on its way. I can’t help but laugh at the image: pregnant, barefoot, and in the kitchen. This woman is one of my best friends. As roommates during graduate school at NYU, I’d sit on my side of the run-down apartment smoking cigarettes out the window, pacing and cussing a blank computer screen,

I met with Rebecca Miller on a recent chilly afternoon in New York to talk about her ambitious new novel, Jacob’s Folly (Farrar, Strauss Giroux). Her previous books include a story collection, Personal Velocity, and a novel, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee; she also wrote and directed the films based on these books. While it may be for her films that she is best known (she is also the writer and director of “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” and “Angela”), Rebecca Miller is a novelist in her own right. We took refuge in the warmth of a

Ben Fountain’s literary breakthrough came at age forty-eight, eighteen years after he quit law to write fiction. His debut short-story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, earned him critical acclaim and a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2007. Five years later, Fountain’s first novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, received the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, was shortlisted for the National Book Award, and is a finalist for this year’s NBCC award in fiction. The book takes place on one epic day in the life of nineteen-year-old Billy Lynn, a virgin from a small town in Texas who goes off to