All stills from The Hedgehog (2024). Photographs courtesy of Zheng Zhi.

The writer Zheng Zhi’s first novel, Floating, was published in China in 2007, when he was nineteen years old. Since then, he has published three more—a fifth will come out this year—as well as numerous volumes of short fiction, all while writing prolifically for film and television. His literary career has placed him at the vanguard of what is now known as the Dongbei renaissance, a group of writers hailing from the northeastern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Zheng’s native Liaoning, all of whose upbringings were marked by the recession that occurred there in the eighties and nineties. Given Zheng’s stature in his home country, it feels surprising that “The Hedgehog,” which appears in the Review’s new Spring issue, is his first work of fiction to be published in English. With help from the novelist Jeremy Tiang, who translated the story, we spoke to Zheng about the turns of fate and the funding issues that have, over the years, led him away from and back to serious writing, as well as about his childhood fear, which makes its way into the story, that his sanity would hold out for only so long.

—Owen Park

INTERVIEWER

“The Hedgehog” was first published anonymously with the title Xiānzhèng (Immortal syndrome), as part of a competition in the literary magazine Lǐ (Newriting). The story caused a bit of a stir among readers in the Chinese literary world as they struggled to guess the identity of its author. Up to that point, you’d been more successful in the realm of commercial fiction. What was it like to participate in this anonymous contest?

ZHENG ZHI

The entries were a mixture of open submissions and solicited manuscripts. One of the editors, Zhou Jianing, approached me to ask if I’d be interested, and of course I accepted the challenge, in part to force myself to try something new. Six months later, with the deadline fast approaching, Jianing checked in to see how I was doing—and as I’d completely forgotten that I’d agreed to do it, I ended up writing the whole story in the final three days. The word limit was twenty thousand characters, and my story was nineteen thousand. If not for this restriction, I’d probably have kept going and turned it into a novella or even a short novel. All the short-listed stories appeared in the magazine—I remember they were spread across three issues over three or four months—and also on the magazine’s WeChat page. Readers had the choice of buying the magazine or simply reading them online. As promised, the stories were credited only by a serial number—I was no. 11—and people were speculating about who each author might be. I was surprised by how many young writers got involved in these discussions, which became quite animated. The organizers did a good job keeping things confidential—or at least I didn’t know who any of the other authors were. The whole competition felt fair, and very exciting. I’d previously seen this sort of “anonymous” competition only in the world of variety shows, where singers wear masks and the audience has to guess who they are based on their voices. The way I see it, an author’s style is equivalent to a singer’s voice. Being identifiable is very important. Read More

Robert Frost, between 1910 and 1920, via Library of Congress. Public domain.

Though he is most often associated with New England, Robert Frost (1874–1963) was born in San Francisco. He dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard, taught school like his mother did before him, and became a farmer, the sleeping-in kind, since he wrote at night. He didn’t publish a book of poems until he was thirty-nine, but went on to win four Pulitzers. By the end of his life, he could fill a stadium for a reading. Frost is still well known, occasionally even beloved, but is significantly more known than he is read. When he is included in a university poetry course, it is often as an example of the conservative poetics from which his more provocative, difficult modernist contemporaries (T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound) sought to depart. A few years ago, I set out to write a dissertation on Frost, hoping that sustained focus on his work might allow me to discover a critical language for talking about accessible poems, the kind anybody could read. My research kept turning up interpretations of Frost’s poems that were smart, even beautiful, but were missing something. It was not until I found the journalist Adam Plunkett’s work that I was able to see what that was. “We misunderstand him,” Plunkett wrote of Frost in a 2014 piece for The New Republic, “when, in studying him, we disregard our unstudied reactions.” We love to point out, for example, that the two roads in “The Road Not Taken” are worn “really about the same,” as though to say that your first impression of the poem—as about choosing the road “less traveled by”—was wrong. For Plunkett, “the wrongness is part of the point, the temptation into believing, as in the speaker’s impression of himself, that you could form yourself by your decisions … as the master of your fate.” Subsequent googling told me that Plunkett had been publishing essays and reviews, mostly about poetry, rather regularly until 2015, when he seemed to have fallen off the edge of the internet. After many search configurations, including “adam plunkett obituary,” I found a brief bio that said he was working on a new critical biography of Robert Frost, the book that would become Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He responded to my October 2022 email, explaining that he had “stopped writing much journalism as of 2015 so as to avoid distractions from a book project that I thought would take an almost unfathomably long time—two years or perhaps even three. Seven years later, I’m doing my best to polish the third draft.” Just as Plunkett is the unique reader of Frost interested in both our studied and unstudied reactions to the poems, he is the unique biographer of Frost whose work is neither hagiography nor slander. His is a middle way of which, I think, Frost would approve. Recently, we talked on the phone about why Frost has become uncool, Greek drama, and, relatedly, the soul.

INTERVIEWER

What makes you and Frost a good fit?

ADAM PLUNKETT

I tend not to think that stuff other people think is obvious is obvious.

INTERVIEWER

And Frost is obvious?

PLUNKETT

Everyone feels like they have some sense of Frost. Everyone knows a poem or two. That kind of overexposure lends an aspect of at least apparent obviousness. But there’s another aspect, too, which is that many people read Frost for the first time as children and associate him with an early stage of life. There’s a cultural association between the time of exposure and the level of sophistication. You’d sound pretty vulgar if you said, Oh, yeah, I learned to play Bach when I was thirteen—that’s easy stuff. But people really do make pronouncements like that about literature. Someone I met a few years ago, a big poetry person, just could not believe that an adult would spend years of his life thinking about Robert Frost. To her it seemed like doing a Ph.D. in simple algebra. Read More

Sally Rooney. Photograph by Kalpesh Lathigra.

Each of Sally Rooney’s novels writes back to a novel that she admires: Conversations with Friends to Jane Austen’s Emma; Normal People to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda; Beautiful World, Where Are You to Henry James’s The Golden Bowl; and Intermezzo to James Joyce’s Ulysses. But while Rooney is delightfully conversant in the history of the novel, it is not, she says, her first thought when she starts to write. Her characters simply walk into her mind and stay there until she has puzzled out the precise nature of their relationships to one another. In Intermezzo, as in the novels that preceded it, her characters—Peter and Ivan Koubek, and the women they love—are often self-deceiving, misguided, and dishonest. No one’s intentions are pure. No one’s actions are consistent. Yet amid this tangle of secrets and lies there is, every so often, a glimmer of mutual understanding—a minor triumph in a world designed to erode all human exchanges and emotions. It is the burden and the pleasure of the novel, from Austen to Rooney, that it can animate these triumphs and the unbeautiful world from which they arise, so long as we keep turning the pages.

This summer, Rooney and I met in Dublin, where we mostly talked about novels, old and new. We met again on September 25, for a public conversation onstage at the Southbank Centre in London. Before Rooney and I began to speak, she delivered a brief statement condemning the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the deaths of civilians in Israel, in Palestine, and in Lebanon. She urged the audience “to keep protesting, to keep speaking out, to keep demanding an end to this horrifying war.” Although our conversation in London was a continuation of our earlier exchange, her words were a reminder that any discussion of the novel, cannot be, and must not be, isolated from a consideration of longer and broader histories—of death and dispossession, beauty and belonging.

INTERVIEWER

In Dublin this summer, we talked about contemporary novelists who, quite self-consciously, are writing back toward the history of the novel. You said something that stuck with me—“Many writers are contemptuous of the novel as a bourgeois form, but I love the novel.” How does one sustain that love for the novel at a time of horrific violence? More specifically, what shape does that love take in Intermezzo?

SALLY ROONEY

I stand by that. I do love the novel, and I think a lot about its specific textual lineage. My great friend Tom Morris is a fantastic short-story writer, and he often says short-story writers get asked about form, but novelists just get asked what their novels are about. We tend to forget that the novel isn’t just a big, long piece of text. When we say it’s a bourgeois form, what we mean is that it emerged coincident with the emergence of industrial capitalism, and it documented a kind of psychology, a kind of individuality that that historical moment produced and made possible, which was, at the time, a bourgeois subjectivity. Now, in the twenty-first century, most novels have been written by people who had to work for a living, who didn’t just live off passive income, capital income, and most protagonists of novels similarly don’t live off the riches of their tenant farmers, as the protagonists of nineteenth-century novels often did. How can contemporary novelists work in conversation with that textual lineage, respond to it, subvert it, make it more capacious, or change the kinds of subjectivity it’s capable of documenting? Read More

Photograph by Francesca Mantovani.

Anne Serre’s “That Summer,” which appears in the new Summer issue of  The Paris Review, opens with an anticlimactic claim: “That summer we had decided we were past caring.” But the story that follows is packed with drama. Over the course of three pages, it chronicles interactions among four characters in a family—two of whom are institutionalized. There are two deaths. Serre’s narrator’s reflections on her family dynamics, charged and nuanced, are the main attraction. They bring to light entire dimensions of experience; when life has such a finely wrought interior, death is literally the afterthought. 

“That Summer” previously appeared in French, in Au cœur d’un été tout en or, a collection of stories of similar brevity. That was not Serre’s first book of short-shorts, though her books available in English are made up of longer texts. They include three short novels—The Governesses, The Beginners, and A Leopard-Skin Hat—and The Fool and Other Moral Tales, a collection of novellas. All are translated by Mark Hutchinson, who is a longtime friend. Her untranslated works include Voyage avec Vila-Matas, which riffs on an experience of reading Serre’s Spanish contemporary, going so far as to feature a fictionalized version of Enrique Vila-Matas, and Grande tiqueté, written in a combination of French and a language Serre invented for the purpose. In her latest novel, Notre si chère vieille dame auteur, an elderly authoress whose death is imminent directs the process of assembling the manuscript that she has, already, left behind.

This interview was conducted primarily over email. A WhatsApp call was thwarted by “enormous storms” in the Auvergne region where, for two months out of the year, Serre lives, in a house that was also her grandparents’. As in Paris, she lives alone, something she has wanted since her adolescence. Asked if she would field a personal question, the author was encouraging. “Literature is personal,” she said.

—Jacqueline Feldman

INTERVIEWER

Are you in Auvergne right now?

ANNE SERRE

Yes, I am. As I’ve been doing every summer for a long time now, I’m spending two months of vacation here, in this region of mountains and small lakes, in the house I have inherited. Now that my whole family has passed away, the house belongs to me.

I don’t write here. I spend my vacation the same way I did when I was a child. I walk in the lanes and meadows, look at the scenery, swim in the lakes, and at night I read in bed. There are a huge number of books in the house—three generations’ worth. Basically, I do pretty much the same things I did when I was twelve or fourteen. Read More