This issue features a “micro-interview” with Mark McGurl, conducted by Lee Konstantinou. Mark McGurl is a professor at UCLA, where he teaches classes on American literature and culture. His new book, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, locates an unlikely cast of writers—Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Raymond Carver, and Philip Roth, among others—squarely in the context of the growth of creative-writing programs in the U.S. after World War II.

–Lee Konstantino