Parul Sehgal has rather a lot to do, and she’s fine with that. “I only care about doing the work. I have zero other ambitions. I’m the laziest, least socially ambitious person, ever. And I don’t get off on the punitive power of the critic; you know that brand of critic, the scold, who has appointed himself to keep the ecosystem clean. That’s the kind of thing that I find very uninteresting. Taxonomizing has very little to do with how and why people read.”