Senior Lecturer Nate Brown recently interviewed two novelists about their work. Writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, his conversation with Baltimore-based novelist Barbara Bourland investigates the complexities of western princess narratives and the fundamental problems of life under capitalism, topics central to the author’s latest work, The Force of Such Beauty. In the interview, Bourland discusses her writing and research processes and attempts to unpack the socially and politically complicated lives of contemporary royal figures. 

Brown’s interview with author Rebecca Rukeyser in Electric Literature focuses on The Seaplane on Final Approach, Rukeyser’s alternately hilarious and discomfiting debut novel. In it, a teenaged protagonist named Mira indulges in passionate fantasies even as she witnesses—and is ultimately unable to intervene in—an act of sexual predation perpetrated by the proprietor of the Alaskan lodge where she’s working for the summer. In this discussion, Rukeyser and Brown talk about the thorny nature of coming-of-age stories and the complexities of young love, obsession, voyeurism, and finding one’s place in the world.