Lit Hub Asks: 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers

The Lit Hub Author Questionnaire is a monthly interview featuring seven questions for five authors with new books. This month we talk to: Lauren Michele Jackson (Back: Essays on the Soul and Spine of America) Natasha Lennard (On Un/Certainty: The Uses of Doubt in Dangerous Times) Julie Orringer (Luna, Phoenix, Queen) Kawai Strong Washburn (The Names of the New World) Adam Wilson (Fail Sons) Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about? Lauren Michele Jackson: Form—but isn’t everything?

How what something looks like courts our thinking about it. The beauty of a wayward humanism. The United States as a not-self-evident object of attention.

Natasha Lennard: Stop talking about “these uncertain times.” Julie Orringer: Artistic and marital betrayal. An injured dog who elicits confessions. A deer and a hedgehog in love.

How we remain ourselves as the outlines of our lives change. Kawai Strong Washburn: Courage, political and cultural evolution, the glory of the Pacific islands, climate instability, race, transcendence, Minnesota. Adam Wilson: The fantasy of immortality.

Fathers, sons, and brothers. Millennials in midlife crisis. Natasha Lennard: Constant talk of uncertain times, language games, hinges and riverbeds, uprisings, mass strikes, the impossibility of doubting everything.

Adam Wilson: Twenty years of talk therapy. Two years of physical therapy. Kawai Strong Washburn: The landscapes of Hawai’i and Minnesota, storytellers that embrace the political, a multiracial and multicultural personal history that spans continents and defies categorization, storytellers that bend their prose to the breaking point, climate visionaries focused on a better future, hip-hop.