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More on Fiction & Poetry from The Atlantic Monthly.

Also by Jessica Murphy:

"Sentence by Sentence" (April 17, 2006)
Short story writer Amy Hempel talks about forensics, seeing eye dogs, and her new Collected Stories

"Zadie, Take Three" (September 16, 2005)
The author of White Teeth and The Autograph Man talks about her new comedy of manners-cum-campus novel and the pitfalls of literary celebrity.

"Character Is Action" (December 3, 2004)
Margot Livesey talks about her new novel, Banishing Verona, and her commitment to writing literary page-turners.

Previously in Interviews:

"The Man Behind the Stories" (June 30, 2005)
C. Michael Curtis, The Atlantic Monthly's fiction editor, discusses short stories, discovering new writers, and his long tenure at the magazine. By Mary Ann Koruth.

"The Secret History" (June 13, 2005)
Caroline Elkins, the author of Imperial Reckoning, talks about unearthing the sinister underside of Britain's "civilizing" mission in Kenya. By Sage Stossel.

"Managing China" (May 19, 2005)
Robert D. Kaplan looks ahead to the great military and diplomatic challenge of the twenty-first century. By Katie Bacon.

"America in Foreign Eyes" (April 22, 2005)
Bernard-Henri Lévy speaks with David Brooks about America—its patriotism, its religion, its ideology.

"Write What You Like" (April 13, 2005)
Curtis Sittenfeld, the author of Prep, on literary page-turners and the problem with too much cleverness. By Katie Bacon.

"Myths and Metaphors" (April 7, 2005)
Kazuo Ishiguro on Jane Austen, adapting his work for film, and his latest novel, Never Let Me Go By Jennie Rothenberg.

Atlantic Unbound | July 6, 2005

Interviews

The Art of the Unconscious

Joyce Carol Oates talks about modern science, the writing life, and "*BD* 11 1 86," her short story in the fiction issue

.....

[Note: The plot of "*BD* 11 1 86" is given away in this interview. Click here to read the story first.]

y belief is that art should not be comforting," Joyce Carol Oates wrote in her introduction to The Best American Essays of the Century; "for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish." Tall demands for art in this next, twenty-first century? Perhaps. Yet these demands remain the very lifeblood of Oates's incredibly wide and varied body of work.

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Discuss this article in Post & Riposte.

More Interviews in Atlantic Unbound.

Jessica Murphy, a former Atlantic staff editor, is the 2006-2007 Milton Center writing fellow in Seattle, Washington. Her writing has appeared in Poets & Writers Magazine and her fiction is forthcoming in Memorious magazine.