Laura Adamczyk Interviewed

Laura Adamczyk has a genius for bars. She finds a place that will give you enough but not too much of what you want: a bartender who’s hard to charm but makes a solid cocktail, a group of regulars who won’t really care what you’re up to, a jukebox with the right mix of classic rock, old country, and soul. You have to trust her; if you do, you’ll like where you end up. In her fiction, as in her life—including her deft, jangling, 2018 story collection Hardly Children and her debut novel Island City (FSG)—she doesn’t traffic in luxury. Instead, she traffics in the pities of existence, told with stylish wit and a slicing lack of varnish.