A conversation with Terese Svoboda about her latest book, Hitler and My Mother in Law, and how writing through uncertainty and using humor to face the unbearable truths history leaves behind.

“I’ve seen too much writing lately that makes metaphors of hunger.”

“Putin has attacked Ukraine /
I’m tired because I stayed up late watching sitcoms”

“What’s missing, what isn’t there, creates the poetry.”

For Piper, race was always a conscious affiliation, not an essentialist identity. […] Throughout all of this, Piper seems to have organically arrived at an understanding of race that aligns with its actual definition—a social construct rather than a biological fact.

I began reading Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend (1947), in mid-2016, casually. I’d bought the book by mistake several years prior, thinking it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s version—that is, the seminal German Faust. I am not the first to have confused the two authors.