This special conversation on 2023’s Critical Hits Anthology: Writers Playing Video Games features Carmen Maria Machado, J. Robert Lennon, and Larissa Pham.

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”

J. Robert Lennon is the author of ten novels, including Familiar, Broken River, and Hard Girls, and the story collections Pieces for the Left Hand, See You in Paradise, and Let Me Think. He is the co-editor of the anthology Critical Hits. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

Larissa Pham is an artist and writer in New York. She writes fiction, essays, and criticism and is the author of Fantasian, a novella, and Pop Song, an essay collection, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize.