![Write what you don't know Write what you don't know](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/cadenza-feature-290x290.jpg)
Write what you don’t know
By the time I wrote Cadenza, I had realised that the advice to ‘write what you know’ was lousy advice for a fiction writer. Part of my artistic agenda was to do something like the opposite. Writing what you know is a good way to stop your imagination before it even gets started. It’s also...
![Time to say goodbye Time to say goodbye](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/birds-of-north-america-feature-290x290.jpg)
Time to say goodbye
Most people live in compromise. For me, this has never been an option. Not that I ever wanted some insipid “normal” existence, but people have said, and I suppose will always say, she did this or that “because of the accident” or “in spite of the accident.” These statements amount to the same thing: they’re...
![Catskills karma Catskills karma](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/birdeye-feature-290x290.jpg)
Catskills karma
In 1973 my family spent a summer in the Catskills, upstate New York. One afternoon I peeped through the fence of our front yard as a woman with long yellow hair lay down in the middle of the road. My mother said there was a house near the river where the hippies lived. They did...
![Nikhil Parmar: Spirited, inspired and fundamentally hilarious Nikhil Parmar: Spirited, inspired and fundamentally hilarious](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/nikhil-parmar-feature-1-290x290.jpg)
Nikhil Parmar: Spirited, inspired and fundamentally hilarious
Nikhil Parmar’s acclaimed debut play Invisible returns to London’s Bush Theatre for a limited run before transferring to New York as part of the 2023 Brits Off Broadway festival. The provocative one-man show is a darkly comic tour-de-force in which an underemployed actor (and overemployed dealer) takes drastic steps to get noticed. I fire off...
![The train The train](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/man-who-invented-feature.jpg)
The train
The train to Paris, which had been expected at 2:37 p.m., pulled in five minutes behind schedule. Albert Le Prince didn’t see his younger brother, Louis, very often anymore. Louis had moved away from France over twenty years ago – and if that wasn’t enough, lately he had been consumed by his work on a...
![Upwards and sideways Upwards and sideways](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/brown-girls-feature.jpg)
Upwards and sideways
Daphne Palasi Andreades’ stunning debut novel Brown Girls (Fourth Estate, 3 February 2022) is a vibrant and poetic look at the lives of women of colour growing up in modern America. Told in vignettes, we meet a collective group of girls from different immigrant backgrounds finding their way in today’s society. On a single block...
![Nasim's story Nasim's story](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/New_Yorkers_feature.jpg)
Nasim’s story
I moved to New York in January 2014 to start reporting New Yorkers. I had spent the previous decade researching, reporting and writing two books about other places. They were based on my experiences interviewing a wide array of people to get a feel for their lives, their work and the places they made. For...
![Raven Leilani: In the air tonight Raven Leilani: In the air tonight](https://bookanista.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Luster_cover_slider-290x290.jpg)
Raven Leilani: In the air tonight
Luster is an original, darkly funny debut about an interracial love triangle, by a new voice with the power to turn modern manners upside down and inside out. Edie is having online sex with Eric, a man she met on a dating app who messages her with impeccable punctuation – she has a good feeling...