Writing

• An Interview with Viet Thahn Nguyen - The Harvard Review

  August 19, 2024

  Former associate editor Andrew Koenig sat down with Viet Thanh Nguyen to discuss his memoir A Man of Two Faces, the themes of his 2023–2024 Charles Eliot Norton lecture series “To Save and to Destroy: On Writing as an Other,” and how he sees this work fitting in with his career as a novelist.

• Old Tales, New Stories (Harvard Profile) - Harvard Griffin GSAS News

  May 29, 2024

  Andrew Koenig is a PhD student in the Department of English. He discusses his work on the phenomenon of rewriting, its larger context, and the joy he has found teaching while at Harvard Griffin GSAS.

• In Memoriam, Louise Glück - Harvard Review

  October 14, 2023

  I first learned of Louise Glück’s poetry while I was a student at Yale, where she taught. Fellow students spoke highly of her poetry workshops. Although I never took one, Glück’s reputation preceded her. Everyone who had taken one of her classes was a better poet for it. Poems that were loose, vague, imprecise but were trying to convey something real, became, in the hands of Louise Glück, poetry.

• Three New Collections by Three Harvard Poets - Harvard Review

  September 12, 2023

  Their subject matter may differ in seriousness and focus, but in spirit these three collections by three Harvard poets—Was It for This, Things I Didn’t Do with This Body, and Our Dark Academia—reflect the jolts of the era we’re living in, a time when grief and mental health are top of mind, where it is increasingly hard to separate the poet’s mind from the world “out there,” where it seems necessary to modulate constantly between the personal and the political, prose and verse. They are some of the strongest poetry collections of the year thus far, offering rays of compassion, insight, and humor in the face of tragedy.

• Review of Novel Subjects - Modern Fiction Studies

  June 14, 2023

  With Novel Subjects, Leah A. Milne has made a significant contribution to the field of ethnic studies. Building on the work of Anne Cheng and Cathy Park Hong, Milne looks at contemporary American authors such as Louise Erdrich, Ruth Ozeki, and Percival Everett. Milne skillfully supplements self-care and multiculturalism, which are the grounding concepts of this study, with other ideas. Traditional literary concepts such as defamiliarization, metafiction, and spectrality help Milne build her case, as do legal and political concepts such as plagiarism, cosmopolitanism, and boba liberalism.

• Review of My Phantoms - Harvard Review

  April 4, 2023

  My Phantoms feels particularly welcome right now, when the topic of severing ties is ubiquitous, and when bad advice on the subject abounds. Although it is not yet as well decorated as Gwendoline Riley’s acclaimed early novel, First Love (still underrated on this side of the Atlantic, but newly reissued by New York Review Books in tandem with My Phantoms), it is one of the past year’s best.

• The Pulitzer Prize Winner We Didn't Know We Needed - Harvard Review

  July 22, 2022

  The Netanyahus is a novel that actually teaches you a thing or two. In this respect, it typifies what contemporary fiction is doing well—asking why history happened the way it did, filling in the gaps with confabulations, exploring the subtle gradations of identity.

• On Sebald’s “Self-Protective Porkies”: An Interview with Carole Angier - The Harvard Review

  December 8, 2021

  Carole Angier has written award-winning biographies of Jean Rhys and Primo Levi, and this summer saw the release of her third biography, Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald. Recently, Angier sat down with me (on Zoom) to talk all things Sebald. We discussed the controversial, genre-bending, and inimitable work of the “inveterate fictionalizer,” his fraught relationship to the German literary establishment, and his legacy as one of the great writers of the Jewish refugee experience.

• An Interview with Lorrie Moore - The Harvard Review

  July 22, 2021

  Lorrie Moore is the author of multiple short story collections and three novels, Anagrams, A Gate at the Stairs, and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Currently the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, she taught at the University of Wisconsin for nearly thirty years. In this conversation with Harvard Review book review editor Andrew Koenig, she talks about the recent publication of her Collected Stories, as well as the challenges of writing during a pandemic.

• What’s a Novel Good For? - Los Angeles Review of Books

  March 21, 2021

  Best known as editor of the definitive The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, Dorothy Hale tracks, in The Novel and the New Ethics, what she calls the “ethical turn” in modern fiction — a turn responsive to the increasing pressure that authors are under to perform ethical work. Hale’s subject might be seen to embrace two complementary propositions: first, that novels can better their readers; and second, that authors can and should convey the experience of others ethically and responsibly. The primary contention of The Novel and the New Ethics is that this “turn,” away from the Victorian cult of sympathy and toward a more tentative and diffident form of relationality, is what distinguishes the modern novel, which, for her, begins around 1900.