Hisham Matar takes a walk with Naguib Mahfouz
conducted by Fatima AlJarman
Spring 2026
"We all experience dreams in a distant state, and emerge out of them with a bereft and hazy memory. We may put pen to paper in an attempt to record-keep, but the hues and details of our dream world can never be recorded in their exactitude. What we are left with, then, is a translation. Mahfouz translates his dreams onto his journal in Arabic, and Hisham Matar translates them into English. I, in turn, translate too—from words on the page to images and interpretations in my mind."
Conversation with Caren Beilin
conducted by Eve Rosenblum
Spring 2026
"Every child is so myopic, and what a beautiful place it was to be myopic in. There’s so much mica in the area, so there’s so much glitter in the rocks. As a child, we would be surrounded by glittering silver, roaming around with what we thought of as silver and gold.
These are things that are still in me so I try to imbue that feeling into my novels."
*Below are selected interview excerpts from the early cycles of CJLC. All previous interviews are available through the digitized issue print.
Formalism, Structuralism, and “Infrastructuralism”:
An Interview with Caroline Levine
conducted by J. H. Jason Kim
Volume V, 2006-2007
"All of these excitingly different approaches to form have led me to wonder whether a more fundamental question is now at stake: that is, just what kind of a thing is a form? I’ve wanted to do the theoretical work of rethinking the very category of form itself. So that’s where I think I fit into the current debates in the field."
The Consolation of Philosophy: An Interview with Elaine Scarry
conducted by Noah Block-Harley
Volume IV, 2005-2006
"I read about neuroscience with fascination and also really believe it will have
wonderful revelations. But with a subject like beauty or imagination, we have these
writers who both enact for and act on us, writers that actually conscript us into
imagining in certain ways. It would take a long time before neuroscience could
provide an account for what happens when I read about Achilles’ rage, for example.
Even then, what would I do with that account?
That imagining, moreover, is social."