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In “Martyr!,” Cyrus battles with an addiction and becomes enamored by religion and all that it promises.

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In his first novel, Martyr!, poet and educator Kaveh Akbar takes on addiction, religion, and displacement with a tender touch. None of these is a new subject for Akbar. He is also the author of the poetry collections Pilgrim Bell, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, and Portrait of the Alcoholic, which mine similar experiences.

The prolific, award-winning writer discusses her latest short story collection, “Old Babes in the Wood,” and its intimate look at a long-term relationship.

Once when Margaret Atwood was young, her parents invited eager Mormon missionaries into their home (a scenario that seems all but foreign to us now). “Mum and dad loved to have people in and listen to what they had to say,” she says on a call from her office in Toronto. The elder Atwoods listened politely before thanking the young men and agreeing to a prayer. But when one of the missionaries asked the Heavenly Father to “please grant Margaret and Carl another 50 years of married bliss,” Margaret Atwood, senior, cut in. “My mother said, ‘No, no, that’s too much!’”

Eleanor Catton has spent much of the last decade writing with the constraints of a television budget in mind, so she was excited to begin her latest novel with a bang. Or more precisely, a landslide.

“As a screenwriter, you’re always being told that you can’t do things because they’re too expensive,” Catton says over a Zoom call from her home in Cambridge, U.K., where she lives with her husband and daughter. “And when I finally got to write this book, I was like, ‘I’m free!’” Without any limitations, Catton was able to write a landslide that killed five people into the opening paragraph of Birnam Wood, her newest novel. “And it was just me being like, ‘Yes! At last, I can write something that a producer isn’t gonna say, ‘We’ve got to cut this, sorry. Can it be one person who dies?’”

The acclaimed author discusses the democratization of art, writing a campus novel that looks beyond the students, and more.

Not only did Brandon Taylor’s new novel, The Late Americans, initially not make it out of the editing process, it also nearly ended his career as a writer. Taylor wrote the novel in about six months, sold it, and spent a year trying to get it into a shape he liked.

The prolific author discusses her newest release, "Silver Nitrate."

After Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic became a massive hit, eventually landing on the New York Times best-seller list in 2020, you might think she would rest easy for a while. But this was not the case. “You don’t get just one book that does well, and then you can sit back and never do anything ever again,” she says. “Unless I guess it’s like To Kill a Mockingbird or something like that. But I don’t want to write just one book.” So, she stayed at her full-time job, using vacations and weekends to attend literary events and interviews while squeezing in writing time and publishing a book a year since 2015. And on the heels of the critically acclaimed and commercially popular Mexican Gothic, Moreno-Garcia was able to quit her job this year and focus entirely on her writing.

The author of the “New York Times” bestseller “The Glass Castle” is back with her new novel, “Hang the Moon,” which focuses on Prohibition-era Virginia.

Jeannette Walls began her writing career covering the flashy world of celebrity gossip as a columnist for New York magazine, Esquire, and MSNBC, but when she turned her attention to the childhood she spent in poverty, her career reached new heights. Walls’ 2005 memoir, The Glass Castle, spent five years on the New York Times best-seller list and made its way into classrooms across the country.

Inspired by traditional lore and fairy tales, Link’s latest short story collection will surely transport readers to new realms.

In 2018, when Kelly Link was given a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, commonly referred to as a genius grant, she was shocked. “They drop it on you like a hammer,” she says. “It’s not something that you apply for. It’s not something that you even know about until they’ve made the decision.” But the grant, given to Link for “pushing the boundaries of literary fiction in works that combine the surreal and fantastical with the concerns and emotional realism of contemporary life,” gave Link the time she needed to focus on her work. “It bought me a lot of time,” she says. “It literally bought me a lot of time in which I could do that work at a more sustainable pace.”

The acclaimed writer Yiyun Li discusses her new short story collection.

When Yiyun Li moved to the United States in the 1990s to study immunology at the University Iowa, she signed up for a creative writing class or two just to improve her English. Nearly two decades later, with an MFA from the lauded Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Li is now a creative writing professor at Princeton who has published five novels, three short story collections, and a memoir.

Author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah discusses how he arrived at the interesting premise of his first novel.

When Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah was writing his first book, a well-received short story collection called Friday Black, he saw the image of a woman “in the eye of the Colosseum” who was rejecting the fame she’d earned through killing. “She was dispassionately telling everyone, ‘I am not your savior or celebrity or whatever you want me to be,’” he says. When he sat down to write the scene, Adjei-Brenyah thought it would be a short story, but it just kept evolving. Over the next seven years, as Adjei-Brenyah was featured in publications like LitHub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica — even having the honor of being selected by Colson Whitehead for the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” honor — that woman kept stirring in his mind and eventually became Loretta Thurwar, a convicted murderer who dominated a dark new form of entertainment, and that short story became Chain-Gang All-Stars, Adjei-Brenyah’s first novel.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author discusses her new short story collection, “Roman Stories.”

In 2012, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri moved her entire family to Rome, partly to pursue fluency in Italian, a process she’s written about extensively in several essays and a nonfiction book called Translating Myself and Others. During her stay in Rome, Lahiri began writing her own fiction exclusively in Italian and then translating her own work (and the work of other writers) into English.

The critically acclaimed writer discusses the new, twisted, deeply unsettling world of Lapvona.

Ottessa Moshfegh doesn’t read her books after they’ve gone to print. When she’s working on a story, she’s deep inside the flow of it, focused on getting things right. Once she can’t make any more changes, it’s on to the next project. What we feel when we read her unsettling work is between us and God; she’s done with it.

Experts say massage parlors where labor and sex trafficking occur are operating in plain sight in North Carolina and across the U.S. They're in strip malls, near police stations and schools, and present unique challenges to law enforcement.

Tucked between a busy cafe and a salon full of friendly chatter and the smell of hairspray, the strip-mall storefront sits empty now. Last month, it housed Neon Moon Spa, a massage parlor where patrons in the know could find a massage and sometimes more. Men slipped into the cash-only business off South Miami Boulevard with $70 for an hour-long massage and a $40 tip for a “happy ending.”

Acclaimed Triangle chef Roberto Copa spent Thursday morning at a diminutive table with a group of 5-year-olds, patiently explaining why the rice they were eating was yellow. Copa, whose Copa Restaurant was recently named one of The News & Observer’s Top Ten New Restaurants of 2018, switched easily between Spanish and English as he talked with George Watts Elementary School students about the meal he had designed for them. As a participant in the first round of a partnership designed by Durham Bowls, Copa and Gwendolyn Coley, the food service manager at the school, developed a Cuban pork and rice bowl that debuted at schools across Durham this week.

Right after the release of their Grammy-nominated album, What Now, Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn of Sylvan Esso felt a little stagnant. Sanborn said they’d gotten too wrapped up in the minute details of production and “lost sight of the forest for the trees.”

“I think it’s easy, especially for a band like ours, to get lost in what the songs sound like instead of what they actually are,” Sanborn says. So they broke the songs all the way down. Instead of coasting on the success of the album, Meath and Sanborn took a group of musician friends out to the mountains to see what the electronic pop duo might sound like as a full band. And it worked. They ended up recording a few songs for the Echo Mountain Sessions, and Meath and Sanborn are about to hit the road for Sylvan Esso’s WITH tour, a short tour with a much bigger band, that will finish up in the Durham Performing Arts Center with performances November 22 and 23.