When I call Yaa Gyasi to talk about her new novel, Transcendent Kingdom, we are both in New York—she in Brooklyn and I in Harlem. Because of the pandemic, even our relative proximity feels like distance. Our conversation often turns to the topic of distance, how it manifests in the novel and how it plays into the journey toward healing.

Transcendent Kingdom could be called a chronicle of an attempt to heal. The narrative follows Gifty, a graduate student at Stanford who is studying reward-seeking behavior in mice. Though Gifty is in denial about her own past trauma, her work is influenced by her family history: her brother’s addiction and eventual overdose, her mother’s depression. That repressed past emerges into the present when Gifty’s mother, in the middle of a depressive episode, moves to California to live with her. With her mother sleeping in her bed, Gifty is forced into a role reversal: caring for the woman who raised her, trying to will her back to health. Gifty is forced to reconcile her new self, the scientist, with the constant reminder of her old self, an Evangelical Ghanaian immigrant raised in Alabama.

I wanted to know how Gyasi came to write a novel that departs so much from her first novel, the critically acclaimed Homegoing, a multigenerational saga that spans centuries. I was surprised to hear her say that sticking to a single character in Transcendent Kingdom felt more freeing. The story feels like an excavation, like pulling from the depths a self. When I heard Gyasi speak years ago at Scripps College, she described Homegoing as “a series of love stories.” And certainly each of those vignettes felt like a tribute, small offerings of a character that left the reader mourning the final page of each chapter. With Transcendent Kingdom, Gyasi proves that she can sustain our love for a character over the course of an entire novel. My heart broke for Gifty, my eyes rolled at Gifty, and my chest tightened each time I felt her finally reaching, tentatively and reticently, for intimacy, community, an acceptance of the past and all the feelings that had gone so long hidden. “Where are you, Gifty?” the reader asks. “Come out, come out, come out.”

INTERVIEWER

This novel is a departure from your last one. In a lot of ways, Homegoing asks questions about American history and mythology. The idea of Americanness. Transcendent Kingdom feels like a personal mythology, a more intimate idea. What is the role of myth, both personal and cultural?

GYASI

With Homegoing I was thinking about the oracular, larger-than-life nature of storytelling—not necessarily myth, but I was thinking a lot about fables and folklore. I was trying to encompass so much time, and that voice of folklore felt like it could lend itself to holding together such a large swath of story. But for Transcendent Kingdom, I think there’s a more intimate nature to the myth. The family has to start anew and create something of their own in a place where they are othered, not just because of their status as immigrants but also because of the reticent nature of the matriarch, who is often very slow to engage with community. It’s this creation of a family myth that allows them to get through without community.

INTERVIEWER

Homegoing holds together so much story in a series of vignettes, but Transcendent Kingdom is the whole history of Gifty’s life, as told by Gifty. How did that feel different, both in the writing and in the aims of the story?

GYASI

I wasn’t setting out to write something completely different from Homegoing when I started. But it became clear to me pretty early on that the story was Gifty’s story alone and that I wanted it to be in first person—and I had never written anything of sustained length in first person before. I found it really challenging and stretching in nice ways. It made me have to think about this character, to try to find ways to see around what she was seeing, and I found that really exciting. There’s a kind of intimacy in this book. I really enjoyed the process of staying with a single character and trying to see into all of the nooks and crannies of her consciousness.

INTERVIEWER

Elsewhere, you’ve said that sticking to Gifty’s life, Gifty’s voice, was more freeing. How so?

GYASI

With Homegoing, I knew that I wanted to write a book that covered many centuries and many different countries and cultures and people, so I took almost a mathematical approach to it. How many years between eighteenth-century Ghana and present-day America? How many generations is that? How many pages do I need to write in order to fulfill that? It was much more constrained than Transcendent Kingdom by design. I wanted Homegoing to move very quickly and so I gave myself a twenty- to thirty-page limit for every chapter. Things like that. Those kinds of restraints I did not have with Transcendent Kingdom. It was just really loose. It could be as long as I wanted, and I didn’t have to move around at all. So there was this freedom to explore and to think about structure in an entirely new way, which was really pleasurable. It was like stretching a muscle that I hadn’t gotten to use the last time.

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I met Makenna Goodman last fall, after moving to a small town in Vermont near the college where I teach. When I say “small town” I mean it: we don’t have a stop light, there’s no restaurant or gas station, and no one really comes here unless they live here. Makenna is my new neighbor, across the road, and she threw me a welcome-to-the-neighborhood party that was the first anyone had ever thrown for me. It was also the last party I attended in someone’s house before quarantine. When Makenna asked me if I wanted to read her debut novel, I said yes, even though I feared the awkwardness that would ensue if I didn’t like it.

Luckily, The Shame is startlingly original, the story of a young woman in Vermont who leaves her husband and children to drive off in the middle of the night for New York, to meet a woman she is obsessed with, a ceramicist she knows only through the internet. Part of its pleasure is in the construction—the recursive loops through the mind of a woman who is breaking down from not making the art she absolutely must make. The structure feels both assured and free—free of so many of the anxieties I’ve seen in so many debuts over the years. I’ve seen a few of the recent reviews address that the narrator is a mother, and say that this is somehow a novel about motherhood, but I think of it as a novel about art and anxiety, and the narrator is a mother. More importantly, this is a novel about how you can feel driven to take risks that don’t matter in order to avoid taking the risks that do matter. How you will drive all night to meet someone you know only from the internet, but won’t sit down and make art. Most importantly, to my mind, it is a novel about the emotional labor of self-sacrifice, a portrait of how the white middle class eats itself, especially by devouring women, who are asked to prepare themselves like a dish to be served—and then to serve it too, as it were.

Makenna’s novel isn’t particularly autobiographical, but it is a bit like talking to her—like her novel, she is blunt and funny, and moves in any direction she wants. It was a pleasure to speak to her about everything from authenticity to social media to “connection.”

INTERVIEWER

I’ve gleaned that you wrote this novel in secret. Is that an accurate statement?

GOODMAN

You make it sound so mysterious and exciting. Yes, I wrote it in secret. I was deep in my editing career, I hadn’t been trying to publish anything, I wasn’t a professional writer. So, writing felt like this thing that was just for me, and I didn’t need to tell anybody about it. At a certain point, after I had finished the first draft, I said to Sam, my husband, Oh yeah, I’ve been working on this thing. I don’t know if it’s any good, and he said, Let me read it. We read very different things and have different taste, so I thought, Well, he’s going to hate it and that’ll be good. Because then he’ll tell me he hates it and then it’ll all be over. But then he said I should send it to my agent, whom I hadn’t talked to in years. And I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know. Okay. But I sent it to her and literally four days later, she wrote me back and she said, We’re sending this out. So, it was kind of traumatic.

INTERVIEWER

This is an interesting way to react. Traumatic?

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I read Being Lolita in two feverish, painful, clarifying, enthralling, disturbing sittings, over the course of two nights, while my toddler daughter slept in the next room. I found myself wanting to reach into its pages and save the girl who was caught in them, but as I kept reading, I started to understand she didn’t need my saving. Her author was the woman she’d become, and her voice was electric, alive, rigorous, humane, allergic to reduction.

It would be easy to summarize Being Lolita as a memoir about a toxic, exploitative relationship between a high school English teacher and his student, and it is about that—but it’s about that in the way Walden is about a pond, or Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is about sharecroppers. Which is to say, it’s also about so much more. It’s about narrative itself—the poly-edged blade of storytelling, how it seduces and distorts and justifies; how it liberates and unsettles; how it settles like fog but also pierces through obscuring mists with the chill sunlight of something uncomfortable getting discovered. It’s a book about the way stories can feel like straitjackets and also like exhalations; how we can lose or find ourselves in them—sometimes both at once.

The book begins at one chalkboard and ends at another, with the student becoming a teacher, reclaiming the stories that once took away her voice even as they convinced her they were giving it to her. It’s a book that’s faithful to the grit and grain of lived experience, how it inheres in a thousand particulars itching like mosquito bites under the skin: the Latin conjugations and hallway gossip and crepe paper banners of high school; the gimlets and bloody sheets and wearying, labyrinthine convolutions of endless gaslighting. It’s a book that knows if you follow these slivers back into the pulse and flesh of memory, they take you somewhere more complicated than the stories we often tell ourselves about abuse and violence, and they force you to reckon with its messy, enduring aftermath.

I first met Alisson Wood after a reading last year, when she approached me to tell me that my own writing had been meaningful to her. There was something in her voice and in her eyes when she described the book she had written that made me realize the world needed it. And when I read Being Lolita a year later, I felt the world expanding—gaining another layer in the compost of its infinite human experience, of all the stories we need to hear told. As I read, I was deeply moved by the ways Wood summoned the teenager she’d once been, faithful to the furrows of that psyche—its delusions and its fragilities and its curiosities and its capacities and its hunger—even as she gazed backward through the years with exacting and attentive clarity.

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Alex Halberstadt is a writer who was born in Russia and lived there until he was nine, when his family (or part of it) immigrated to the United States. He did the rest of his growing up in Long Island City. Educated at Oberlin and Columbia, he has written all sorts of things, books and reportage and profiles. His previous book, the excellent Lonely Avenue, is a biography of the songwriter Doc Pomus, who cowrote “Save the Last Dance For Me,” “This Magic Moment,” and a list of other lasting hits. The New York Times called the book “taut and affecting.” His newest is titled Young Heroes of the Soviet Union. Unexpectedly, given the title, it is a deeply personal book, an engaging and subtle piece of nonfiction that’s full of history and Alex’s own wit, which can flick back and forth from dry to wet in a very effective way. This new book has had the misfortune to be published during the pandemic-related downturn, a moment when many good writers feel like their new books are vanishing into wells. Halberstadt himself caught COVID-19 a couple of months ago and has been suffering some in isolation. I am glad for a chance to call attention to Young Heroes of the Soviet Union. For this interview, conducted in May, we communicated electronically between Brooklyn, where Halberstadt has lived for the past twenty-six years, and Wilmington, North Carolina.

INTERVIEWER

I remember sitting in a bar with you maybe fifteen years ago, and I told you some story about my grandfather that I thought was interesting. When I was done, you sort of waited a beat and said, “My grandfather was Stalin’s bodyguard.” Which is an unfair trump card to be carrying around in your pocket all your life. Then you told me you’d never met him. I said something like, “Why don’t you go find him and write about it!” Any physically conscious person would have said the same thing. What’s remarkable here is that you actually did it. You went to Ukraine and found him. How is it that you had never met your own grandfather?

HALBERSTADT

My father stopped speaking to his father, my grandfather, Vassily Chernopisky, when I was born. There were many sound reasons for him to do this, but mainly he did it because he wanted nothing to do with what his father stood for, which was Stalinism and the power of the Soviet state. My grandfather had been an officer in the secret police for most of his life, and for thirteen years one of Stalin’s personal bodyguards. He was an absent and sometimes brutal father. He was also a gifted photographer, and a really great-looking man obsessed with clothes. When my mother and I left Moscow, when I was nine, we took with us one photo of Vassily and my grandmother Tamara. They are sitting near a lake; he’s wearing a fedora. For years, that was all the proof I had that my grandfather existed. I assumed that he had died sometime shortly after I was born. Then in 2004 my father got a call from a distant cousin who said that Vassily was alive and mentally still with it. That’s when I told you about him at that bar—I had just found out he was alive. Read More

Though a work of fiction, Douglas A. Martin’s recent novella Wolf is written in response to true events: in the early 2000s, two boys, ages twelve and thirteen, were persuaded by a child predator to kill their father. Wolf shifts between various timelines as it imagines the lives of the boys preceding the act—the mental abuse by the father, the manipulation and sexual abuse by the predator—the moment of violence itself, and the courtroom proceedings. In real life and in this novella, the boys were tried as adults and ultimately sentenced to, respectively, seven and eight years in prison.

It’s difficult to write about true events, especially those that receive extensive press coverage, but Martin explicitly writes against the callous sensationalism of the news cycle. He returns the story to the boys themselves. With a narration in the close third person, Martin creates a composite, in all its contradictions. The boys are seeking freedom from their father. They genuinely believe they’ve found an answer in the abusive family friend. Martin allows this belief—this optimism, curiosity, sensitivity, earnestness—to live on the page alongside violation and claustrophobia.

What makes Wolf unique is its refusal to disentangle all these emotions for the reader. In one particularly wrenching scene, the younger boy is writing notes about the nature of love—it seems, perhaps, to be a love note addressed to or about the family friend who has been abusing him: “He writes it on pieces of paper, like it was going to happen the way he wants it to. He knows what love looks like. This was how at first it was going to feel, he has to know like the friend said.” And despite all I know about the context, it is difficult to refute this certainty, he knows what love looks like. The voice is so immersive that I am alongside the boy and, if only for a moment, conflate love and abuse. Even after I shake myself into my own body, I have to ask, How well do I understand the difference? I’m realizing how much I usually depend on instruction to understand and name suffering. Wolf asks us to do this work on our own.

In one of the courtroom scenes, Martin shifts to the perspective of the jurors, who think to themselves: “Best not to get too close to them. Best not to imagine being like one of them, having felt what either must have at one time or another.” When I wrote to Martin, I wanted to ask how to resist this tendency: Best not to get too close. I wanted to know how writing—despite how regularly language is used to lie and mislead—could ever be enough.

This interview was conducted over email in May.

INTERVIEWER

How did you first learn about the crime that inspired Wolf? When did you realize you had questions that needed to be explored in writing?

MARTIN

It was about a year after the actual event, once the story had gone national and the trial was beginning. One day it was a front-page piece, and that was the first I saw of it, almost twenty years ago now. I am not someone who normally reads the paper, but I wanted to know more than just what was behind the picture of two boys and a much larger man in court. My reaction to how my care was being solicited was part of what led to me writing, but also, any time the boys were quoted, it felt so out of place. When I tried to read about the story, the reporting kept bothering me. It continued to play out in the paper for a while, along with new headlines like “bizarre twist,” and stories taking angles on how it was all part a growing trend of children who might be tried as adults given the severity of their violent acts. It got to the point where I felt if I read anything more, I should write it more as I felt it.

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Still from Ten Thousand Birds / Ten Thousand Screens

I first met Alan Pierson in 1996 at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. I was a freshman voice major, and Alan was a first-year graduate student in composition. We got to know each other through music: Alan signed up as my pianist for lessons and recitals, and we have remained very close friends ever since. During the end of his time at Eastman (he would eventually, in 2006, earn his D.M.A. in conducting), Alan founded the sixteen-player new music ensemble Alarm Will Sound, which quickly established itself as a vital part of the new music scene in New York. Over the past two decades, AWS has premiered pieces by John Adams, Steve Reich, Wolfgang Rihm, and Meredith Monk, and has produced a wide-ranging discography, including music by Donnacha Dennehy, David Lang, and Aphex Twin. In addition to his work with AWS, Alan is principal conductor of Dublin’s Crash Ensemble, codirects the Contemporary Music Ensemble at Northwestern University, and is a frequent guest conductor for ensembles including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the London Sinfonietta, among many others.

In 2014, AWS premiered John Luther Adams’s piece Ten Thousand Birds as an immersive outdoor musical experience. On June 3 of this year, Alan and AWS released a new video, Ten Thousand Birds / Ten Thousand Screens, for which Alan and his boyfriend, Paul Melnikow, reimagined the piece using twenty-six phones, tablets, laptops, PDAs, and iPods carefully arranged around their Brooklyn apartment. The result is a strangely beautiful, moving, charmingly wacky experience. On May 26, I spoke with Alan via Zoom about this project, Alarm Will Sound, and his vision for music-making in an age of social distancing.

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