18 Of Our Favorite Author Interviews From Powells.com

A lot of people don't realize that the Powells.com blog contains a treasure trove of over 300 author interviews. We asked the editors of the blog to share their favorites with us and they narrowed it down to 18 they think everyone should read. Once you finish these, head to the blog and discover the rest!

1. Sherman Alexie

"One of the ways in which colonization works is that it destroys family units, and it destroys generational contact. I had no grandparents because they all died for various colonial reasons. Without that connection to grandparents, I lost my connection to my history."

Read the interview here.

2. Claire Messud

"You can make great strides, but the history doesn't go away. It's underneath us. It's inside us. It's behind us. It's around us."

Read the interview here.

3. Maxine Hong Kingston

"You know, there was this surge of hope: we are going to be free of the way the last generation was; we're going to figure out new ways to make a living; we're going to find new ways to lead a political life, a spiritual life; and somehow we are going to be psychedelic."

Read the interview here.

4. Esi Edugyan

"I think that underneath everything, there is this vein of fear, or this feeling of anxiety and dread. This is central to the way people lived their lives back then..."

Read the interview here.

5. Richard Powers

"We live like gods! But very forgetful gods. Very amnesiac and babyish gods."

Read the interview here.

6. Matthew Dickman

"There's something about the inconceivable immensity of outer space that reminds me of grieving over a dead friend or a dead relative."

Read the interview here.

7. Rachel Maddow

"...what the Founders articulated about why a president alone shouldn't be able to make decisions about war is a core value that we've all absorbed as Americans."

Read the interview here.

8. Ann Patchett

"The thing that really made me nuts in the Amazon is that you can't go anywhere by yourself. You can't take the shortest little stroll alone. You have to be with the group all the time, because otherwise something is going to eat you."

Read the interview here.

9. Ishmael Beah

"I lost my humanity, and everyone can lose their humanity if they're put in a circumstance that I was, that a lot of people found themselves in."

Read the interview here.

10. George Saunders

"That's maybe the one unspoken truth about writing: sometimes it's just a riff, you know?"

Read the interview here.

11. Domenica Ruta

"...in my life, there were some moments that were just abjectly horrible and violent and awful; to try to be elegiac about them is insulting to the people who were there..."

Read the interview here.

12. Christopher McDougall

"I'm trying to tell the history of the Tarahumara, the adventure of this race, the back story of ultrarunning, and the anatomy and physiology of human endurance runners."

Read the interview here.

13. Christopher Hitchens

"So we're going to test this proposition that everyone in this country is a credulous believer. I don't think it's true. I'm not sure how confident even the believers are in what they believe."

Read the interview here.

14. Lionel Shriver

"Do you kiss the guy or not? Which is the better life?"

Read the interview here.

15. Kristin Hersh

"So many of my songs are literally true. People give them the benefit of the doubt as being poetry."

Read the interview here.

16. Kevin Young

"...I think I'm very concerned with beats, and movement, and a mix of fluidity and being able to stop on a dime. Talk and music, too — what I'm trying to do makes use of both of those."

Read the interview here.

17. Margaret Atwood

"...if they can grow a kidney just for you in a pig, why wouldn't they grow some hair for you on a sheep?"

Read the interview here.

18. Junot Diaz

"It takes a lot for an entire community to uproot itself and move somewhere else. If you just listen to the individual stories, you lose sight of the larger forces that made it possible, or that made it necessary for a community to move across the spheres."

Read the interview here.