Author

Julia Shipley

@JuliaShipley3
Matthew Pearl and "Into the Shadows" (Filed under: You can't make this stuff up)

Matthew Pearl and “Into the Shadows” (Filed under: You can’t make this stuff up)

Matthew Pearl is a sucker for underdog stories, origin stories and untold stories. Those all came together when the author of best-selling historical fiction thrillers such as “The Dante Club” and…
This American Afterlife: Aaron Mahnke and the spooky podcast (and TV show) "Lore"

This American Afterlife: Aaron Mahnke and the spooky podcast (and TV show) “Lore”

Barely three years ago, Aaron Mahnke, a part-time horror-thriller writer, sat at his computer and started to drag a document to the trashcan. Just as he was about dispose of…
5(ish) Questions: Ted Genoways and his year-long embed on a family farm

5(ish) Questions: Ted Genoways and his year-long embed on a family farm

For more than 15 years now, Ted Genoways has been exploring narratives of how America reaps its food.[pq]”I think that every story works best when the writer is something of…
Ellen Barry and "How to Get Away with Murder in Small-Town India"

Ellen Barry and “How to Get Away with Murder in Small-Town India”

The New York Times foreign correspondent talks about her sensational last story from India, in which she uses first person to unparalleled effect

“Something in the world links faces and leaves and rivers and woods and wind together and makes them a string of medallions with all our faces on them, worn forever round our necks, kin.”

Why is it great? Written long before every person carried a camera, before Facebook, back when “streaming” was just what water did as it coursed through its bed, Goyen, raised…
Monica Hesse and "American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land”

Monica Hesse and “American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land”

The Washington Post reporter talks about what it's like to juggle multiple projects (and genres), and the virtue of capturing the way people talk

“Sometimes at noon down South on the hottest of days, when everyone is shivering inside their arctic offices, I go outside just to hear the metallic whirring of the cicadas start up in the trees on the edge of the parking lot. Their tymbals pulsate against their abdomens and the thick air reverberates with the loneliest sound in the universe.”

In addition to the music of Blythe’s lush language, I love how he captures this brash paradox–that a chorus can make us feel so lonely. Furthermore I love how, like…
Sarah Lyall and (the hilarious) "Paying a Price for 8 Days of Flying in America"

Sarah Lyall and (the hilarious) “Paying a Price for 8 Days of Flying in America”

Whoever said “It is better to travel than to arrive” wasn’t sitting next to Sarah Lyall aboard American Airlines Flight 1886 en route from Iowa to Arizona at the moment…