‘This is a story that gets to the root of how my society is structured right now … There’s a way that prison is invisible to a middle-class person. It’s not a conspiracy, but it may be by design in certain regards. It’s a serious subject for a novelist.’

Rachel Kushner is among America’s brightest literary stars. With her previous…

Meg Wolitzer’s new novel, The Female Persuasion, is about public pedestals and feminist friction.

Wolitzer herself is a feminist powerhouse who wrote her first novel, Sleepwalking, while still at university. A precocious talent, she was mentored by the famous essayist and screenwriter Nora Ephron.

Today, she’s the author of 12 acclaimed novels, including The Interestings and The Uncoupling…

‘Novels are accidents at their start,’ Alexander Chee has written. What causes these productive accidents? Who do they happen to? And what do novels become next?

Chee, the author of two masterful, award-winning novels – and a distinguished teacher, essayist and critic – has given a lot of thought to these questions. His acclaimed, reflexive autobiographical first novel, Edinburgh, was…

Endorsed by the likes of Roxane Gay, Colson Whitehead and George Saunders – and by the New York Timesbestseller list – Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is a star on the rise.

The 27-year-old African American author made his debut last year with Friday Black, a mind-bending and provocative collection of short stories about consumerism, race, technology and the violence of the…

Rebecca Traister is an American journalist, polemicist and New York Times bestselling author who writes at the intersection of feminism, politics and culture. Her latest book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, investigates the potential and complexity of women’s anger as a political and social tool – both historically, and in the reinvigorated contemporary women’s movement in…

Max Porter's first book, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, was an astonishing work about despair, love, memory ... and Ted Hughes.

A strange and beautiful novel of poetry and prose, it told the story of a widower and his two small boys who are visited in their grief by Crow, a self-described 'sentimental bird', and a trickster presence…