In Mark O’Connell’s eerily prescient new book Notes From an Apocalypse, he spells out a question that now feels inescapable: “How are we supposed to live, given the distinct possibility that our species, our civilization, might already be doomed?” In trying to answer, he traveled to places where the looming apocalypse could be glimpsed, talking to those who believed, or wanted to believe, that the collapse of civilization was already underway: preppers, survivalists, people hell-bent on the colonization of Mars.

For his subjects, the question of how to survive the apocalypse is a practical one, and they respond to it with answers like “be obscenely rich,” “dig a big hole in the ground and just stay in it,” or “gaily wash your hands of society, which you were not all that keen on to begin with.” For O’Connell, and for most of us, the question is more complicated—not just how to survive, but how to live—and the conclusions he reaches are what give the book its hope.

Mark and I became friends through Twitter, a fact which has done great damage to my belief that real friendships cannot be forged on the computer. I messaged him more or less out of the blue to ask for his advice on a writing-related problem that I believed to be an intractable disaster, and he pointed out the solution that had been in front of me the whole time. This is typical. As a friend, Mark is generous, with an apparently boundless enthusiasm for connecting people whom he (always correctly) believes will get on with one another.

His first book, To Be a Machine, was awarded the 2019 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He is a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Slate, The Dublin Review, and the Guardian. This interview was conducted over email during the first week of April, while I was in Cape Town and Mark was in Dublin.

INTERVIEWER

The book starts with an epigraph from Annie Dillard, “These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?” What is it about those lines that appealed to you?

O’CONNELL

When I was putting that quote in as the book’s epigraph, I distinctly remember thinking that I was not myself entirely sure why I had chosen it, but that surely I would never be asked to account for it, because no one ever pays much attention to these things. And now here I am, having to do just that for The Paris Review—yet more evidence for my conviction that I can never be permitted to get away with anything. So thanks, Rosa, for that. It’s from For the Time Being, a book I love maybe more than any other book by a living writer. One of the things she does in the book, and in those lines in particular, is sort of deflate the apocalyptic sensibility, the notion that we are living in extraordinary times. The epigraph gestures toward what I was trying to do in my book, which was to do justice to the extreme apocalyptic urgency of our current time while also bearing in mind the fact that, in terms of the broader picture of human life on earth, this is also just business as usual.

Dillard, for me, is an ideal writer, in that she inhabits the world in an ecstatic way while refusing to avert her eyes from its darkness. She is also incredibly funny, without ever stooping to being humorous.

INTERVIEWER

What’s the difference, for you, between a writer who is incredibly funny and a writer who is being humorous? It feels like an important distinction because I think for some people, there’s a suspicion of levity when the subject is inarguably serious, unless the funniness comes delivered to the reader in a package with a label that says “Let Us Pause for Some Light Relief Before We Head Wearily Back To The Salt Mines.” Was that something that you thought about when you were writing the book? Which is, I should say, incredibly funny.

O’CONNELL

Maybe this is a very idiosyncratic and unsustainable distinction, but I can think of nothing less funny than humor as a mode of writing. It’s like stand-up comedy or something. Almost impossible to be authentically funny within the brutal constraints and expectations of that formal context. It’s very gratifying to me when people find my writing funny, but it’s also always very unpredictable. Often the things that people find funny in my writing are things that I have written in a spirit of more or less deadly seriousness. And I’m fine with that—actually, I love it. Because for me, funniness is often an epiphenomenon of absolute seriousness. As a nonfiction writer, you constantly come across situations that are inherently funny, and being funny is just a matter of diligently describing reality. You literally just jot down in your notebook the amazingly strange things that people are constantly saying, and the amazingly strange things that are constantly happening around you, and you write about it as accurately as you can, and often that just winds up being funny. I think the reason I don’t like a lot of so-called humorous writing is that it sort of misses the point of how funny things are, and drowns that reality out with a load of jokes. I also think that writers who are not funny are, in some basic and irreducible sense, unserious.

INTERVIEWER

Throughout the book, you meet a lot of apocalyptically minded people—preppers, bunker salesmen, tech billionaires who want to colonize Mars, tech billionaires who are buying up tracts of New Zealand. As you point out, the idea of civilization’s collapse is nearly as old as civilization itself. But you also make the case that there are particularly lurid strains of doomsday scenarios active today, exemplified by the visions of people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Can you talk a bit about that? Read More

The first moments in Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Starling Days are quiet. Mina, a thirty-two-year-old classicist, is walking along the George Washington Bridge on a humid summer evening. She feels the bridge shudder in the wind. She looks past Manhattan’s skyscrapers and imagines her husband, Oscar, working at home in Brooklyn. It’s not apparent to the reader why she’s here—perhaps Mina herself is uncertain—but then she looks at the river, and remembers what people say about jumping: “When a body fell onto water from this height, it was like hitting a sidewalk.” She gently tosses one of her flip-flops over the edge, before a policeman interrupts the scene. From these first careful sentences, Buchanan sets the tone of the novel, the proximity of its narration. Starling Days is as immediate, changeable, and surprising as real life.

Mina and Oscar are young, recently married, and coping with an intensification of Mina’s depression. Alternating between their points of view, Buchanan maps their attempt to find the key to Mina’s suffering. But despite their intimate knowledge of each other, their shared histories and identities, and their most tender efforts to bring about change (they temporarily move to London early on in the story) many of Mina’s emotions remain impenetrable. When Mina is hospitalized after an overdose attempt, Oscar attends to her: “For the whole visiting hour, his face was twisted with confusion. ‘Why did you do this?’ he’d asked. But she couldn’t point and go, There, that. That’s what’s wrong with me.” The dynamic of this scene replicates itself throughout the novel—the effort to make sense of the inexplicable, the ensuing confusion, the twisted face.

In the darkest moments of this cycle, Starling Days is heartbreaking to read, and yet, most days, I closed the book with immense gratitude for its refusal to pathologize family history or identity. It feels rare—in both literature and in our world—to sit with sadness and allow it to be unruly. Buchanan proves that to recognize that some sadness is unalterable is not necessarily a melodramatic plunge into despair. Strange, enduring sadness has a mirror: small, repeated gestures of survival. In the hospital, Oscar is still looking at Mina, and inviting her to try. 

Rowan and I first spoke via Skype, but our conversation spilled into emails and messages in the weeks that followed. We spoke about choosing to hold on, and about the literature that helps us do so. 

INTERVIEWER

Where did Starling Days begin?

HISAYO BUCHANAN

Maybe books are the record of everything I’ve been fascinated with for several years. I could say Starling Days began in several places and they would all be true.

As a writer, I’m often thinking about how much language we have. In contemporary culture, there are so many words we can use to describe our identity. I could tell you that that I’m mixed race, that I’m dyslexic, that I’m bisexual, on and on. Each word describes something true and important about me. At the same time, no words quite describe the feeling I get when I see a bird take off from a tree that I previously thought was empty. It’s odd to be simultaneously overwhelmed by language and also to find it inadequate.

As I tried to find ways to talk about mental health, often the language around it felt like a way of silencing the experience. A particular phrase stuck out to me: “You have to love yourself, before you ask someone else to love you.” It felt both true and very untrue. It’s extremely hard to conduct a relationship—romantic or otherwise—with someone consumed by their suffering, and yet it’s unfair to expect someone to feel able to love themselves if they’re not receiving any love.

Novels and fiction are a way of examining something I don’t fully understand, so I wanted to write about a couple where one person is struggling with their mental health, and show both sides of the relationship. Although the things that happen to Oscar and Mina are not the things that happened to me, I have loved and cared about people who’ve experienced severe mental health challenges and, when I was a teenager, I experienced very serious depression. I felt able to think about both sides, and invested in thinking about both sides.

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Jane Hirschfield (PHOTO © MICHAEL LIONSTAR)

I first met Jane Hirshfield about fifteen years ago, after one of her readings in San Francisco. She reads her poems with intensity, but not loudly. Her voice is even, quiet. I was struck by the many tonalities of her silences. Still, there is a distinctly recognizable passion in her quiet moments. Speaking with her, I was fascinated by how much I was able to gather from the moments between her sentences, by the way those sentences follow one another, surprising at each turn. This is also true of her poems: reading her work, I catch myself thinking that Hirshfield is the poet who orchestrates silences, which is perhaps fitting for someone who says that her medium is lyric poetry. It isn’t easy these days to find a poet who can do this while being also perfectly articulate and clear. Reading Hirshfield, I find myself coming back to Mahmoud Darwish’s idea that clarity is our ultimate mystery.

Jane Hirshfield’s nine books of poetry include The Beauty, long-listed for the 2015 National Book Award; Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award; and After, short-listed for England’s T.S. Eliot Award and named a “best book of 2006” by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Financial Times. She is also the author of two collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015), and four books collecting and cotranslating the work of world poets from the past. Hirshfield’s ninth poetry collection, newly published this week, is Ledger. This interview took place by email.

INTERVIEWER

Auden called art “clear thinking about complex feeling,” and in your 2015 book of essays, Ten Windows, you speak about the “extra pressure of meaning that infuses” Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”—a poem written in December 1938, a time of deep political crisis. I see a strong element of the poetics of engagement in Ledger. This isn’t new. I think of your 1994 poem “Manners/Rwanda,” for instance. Yet the element of engagement comes across more strongly in this new book. So, I want to begin by asking about the way you relate to those “extra pressures” of our own crisis today in the U.S., about how they have impacted your work and this book.

HIRSHFIELD

A poem, a poet’s life, and the larger world are one continuous fabric. Ledger is a book of stock-taking, a registration both of the personal and of the grievous era all our lives are now visibly part of. As you say, I’ve written poems for decades that speak of the environment, social justice issues, what feel like unceasing wars. What’s changed in this book is the urgency and centrality of these subjects. The time line for swerve feels shorter, the precipice raised to heights fatal not only for individuals, but for the planet.

I don’t know how a poem can touch the catastrophe of the biosphere and what feels like a breakdown of the basic social contract—that we care for one another and that we care for future beings’ well-being. It may be that poetry’s speaking is essential but preparatory, oblique. That our work, yours and mine, is the tilling that precedes planting. That our images and metaphors and statements are like the multitude of tunneling earthworms that keep the earth’s microbiome alive, its structure lightened and turnable, viable for crops. Any one earthworm seems not to matter, yet the existence of earthworms matters. An ethics of preparation means also that poetry’s work may be less to solve than to speak of, to speak on behalf of, that which needs solving. Our human capacities for imagination and art-making, for grief and joy, exist in the service of survival of the single, solitary self and of the whole. Poems sustain the complexity, multiplicity, and peculiarities of lives, not their erasure. They carry the sense of wholeness and unblind us to connection. These allegiances are currently desperately needed.

Goethe wrote, “Do not let what matters most be at the mercy of what matters least.” The two, though, are not separate. An ants’ nest comes into a poem, and reminds that what may seem small—noticing it, wanting its continuance on this perishable and fragile planet—is what matters most. No part of existence is discardable. Read More

Left: Samuel Delany (photo: Michael S. Writz) Right: Jeremy O. Harris (photo: Marc J. Franklin)

At three in the afternoon on a Friday in late January, Jeremy O. Harris arranged for an Uber to bring Samuel Delany from his home in Philadelphia to the Golden Theatre in New York City. Chip, as the famed writer of science fiction, memoir, essays, and criticism prefers to be called, arrived in Times Square around seven that evening to watch one of the last performances of Harris’s Slave Play on Broadway. 

Though the two had never met before, Delany has been hugely influential on Harris, and served as the basis for a character in the latter’s 2019 Black Exhibition, at the Bushwick Starr. And Delany was very aware of Harris. The superstar playwright made an indelible mark on the culture, and it was fitting that the two should meet on Broadway, in Times Square, Delany’s former epicenter of activity, which he detailed at length in his landmark Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and The Mad Man. 

After the production, Harris and Delany met backstage. “A lot of famous people have been through here to see this play, but this is everything,” Harris said. The two moved to the Lambs Club, a nearby restaurant that Harris described as “so Broadway that you have to be careful talking about the plays. The person that produced it is probably sitting right behind you.” (Right after saying this, Harris was recognized and enthusiastically greeted by fellow diners.) Over turkey club sandwiches and oysters, Harris and Delany discussed identity, fantasy, kink, and getting turned on in the theater.

HARRIS

Can I ask you about the play? How are you processing it?

DELANY

I was confused in the beginning, but then I realized, Aha! This is therapy. And then, Aha! The therapists are nuts! Then I traveled around having sympathy for all the characters, especially the stupid good-looking guy. He was sweet, I’ve had a lot of those. The character that I identified with most is the one who insists that he’s not white. I used to get that all the time, I mean, the number of times I was told by my friends at Dalton, Well, I would never know that you were black. As if I had asked them.

One of the best things that ever happened to me happened when I was about ten, which was a long time ago. I was born in 1942, so this is 1952, and I’m sitting in Central Park doing my math homework. This kid, he could have been about nineteen or twenty, and I think he was homeless, he walks up to me, and he says to me with his Southern accent, You a n****, ain’t you? I can tell. You ain’t gonna get away with nothin’ with me.

And I looked up at him, I didn’t say anything, and he looked at me and said, That’s all right. You ain’t gonna get away with nothing from me.

And I was so thankful for it. I realized, first of all, he was right. He was being much more honest with me than any of my school friends.

It was also my first exposure to white privilege. There were a lot of white people from the South who felt obliged to walk up and say, You’re black, aren’t you? They thought it was their duty. In case I thought, for a moment, that they didn’t know. This was part of my childhood: people telling me that I was black.

HARRIS

I appreciated the fact of race in the South. That is one of the reasons why I think a play like Slave Play came out of me. Growing up, I was considered special because I looked the way that I looked, and yet I was smarter than all the white kids, and these are the richest white kids. The teachers had to understand that in some way, and so they thought that if I was smarter than any black person, smarter than all the white kids, that must mean I was an alien. You’re an alien kid, and let’s treat you like an alien. We’re going to put you on a pedestal and other you more than you’re already othered through this intellect.

When I came up North, I encountered this notion that my performativity, the way I performed and the way I engaged in the world, made me not black. I was not black and not white but in a different way than in the South. In the South, everyone was like, you’re black and different and therefore you’re even more special, but the blackness was always there. In the North, they pretended that the blackness wasn’t why they saw me as different. It made me hate the North. You guys are more fucked up. The fact of my blackness is always there, and when I meet someone like you, Chip, I’m like, you’re black.

The sense of gender-nonbinary spaces is something you already knew before there was language for that in the public sphere. Do you feel like that was partially because of your race? Because of the way in which your race was understood?

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“All around us things tried to announce their true nature,” observes Lizzie, the heroine of Jenny Offill’s new novel, Weather. “Their radiance was faint and fainter still beneath the terrible music.” In Weather, as in her groundbreaking novel Dept. of Speculation, Offill captures both the “terrible music” and the “quiet radiance” of contemporary life. She allows us to see the world anew, as a place where we can—and must—encounter both discord and poetry.

Lizzie, a librarian “not young or pretty enough to matter,” moves through a stunned city during and after an election. As she grows “edgy and restless,” she listens to podcasts and lectures about glaciers, and to the seemingly trivial worries of Uber drivers and competitive mothers; she meditates with Buddhists before watching TV shows about extreme shopping and drug addicts ambushed by their families. Like the Wife in Dept. of Speculation, Lizzie is a keen, often hilarious observer, fiercely intelligent but utterly ignored and relatively powerless. Yet Lizzie attempts, even achieves, something heroic by the novel’s end. She sympathizes with the flawed and the flailing; she investigates and instigates survival strategies, and, like Offill herself, she finds the “quiet radiance” despite it all.

Offill and I live close to each other in the Hudson Valley. Reading Weather, I recalled two moments where her presence had shifted something from the ordinary to the beautiful and then to the terrifying. In the first, we went for a walk on a route that was private and, to me, unknown. She had said something about a beach, but I thought this must be an exaggeration, as the landscape around us is forests and hills. Yet when we broke through the clearing, there was not only a beach but a small island and a cove set off from the rest of the Hudson. Something shimmered in the water; I thought it might be a bird. Instead, a naked woman rose out of the water and began to swim toward us. My daughter screamed with joy, thinking she’d at last seen a mermaid. Jenny shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, This is where I live. Strange things happen. Years later, as she drove me home from a party, I mentioned that I was having trouble breathing but it was likely nothing, probably an allergy to dust in my attic or pollen in the fields. I might have ignored the fact that I was often winded and dizzy, but Jenny insisted I go the ER in a manner that felt somehow sage and inarguable. When I went to the hospital the following day, the doctors discovered a collapsed lung and something “suspicious.” All around us things tried to announce their true nature. Recently, I emailed Jenny to ask about post-Trump anxiety, preppers, and how the novel, and the author, can create quiet beauty in a time of terrible music.

INTERVIEWER

Was there a particular moment that led to the inception of this novel?

OFFILL

The novel came out of years and years of talking about extinction and climate change with my friend, the novelist Lydia Millet. At a certain point, all of it just added up and I thought, what is wrong with me that I still think about this so abstractly, that I still don’t feel it? So in a way the process of writing Weather was about trying to move from thinking about what is happening to feeling the immensity and sadness of it.

I was also struck by an article I read about how a well-known British environmentalist, Paul Kingsnorth, was walking away from years of campaigning because he believed hopes were being raised falsely that we could still stop or contain the climate crisis. The article was rather glibly titled “It’s the End of the World as We Know It … and He Feels Fine.”

In fact, he went on to found a group for artists and writers called Dark Mountain. You can read their manifesto here. It begins quite chillingly with this passage:

Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.

The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too carefully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives.

What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end.

A very early draft of Weather had the working title “Learning to Die.”

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I met Amina Cain in the early aughts, when I took over her spot as roommate to a mutual friend in a Wolcott walk-up in Chicago. Amina would come by with her new roommates, a perfectly friendly couple who nonetheless seemed rather fancy to me, as did anyone back then who talked easily about Roland Barthes. But Amina was not fancy; if anything, she had a sort of radical simplicity. Long before I’d read her writing, even longer before I published any of it (my wife and I published her second book through our press, Dorothy, in 2013), my impression of Amina was of a unique soul, quietly pursuing thoughts and concerns outside the more or less conventional life everyone else was living.

People change—I, for one, have come to love reading, teaching, and talking about Roland Barthes. But Amina seems less to have changed than to have become more fully the person she always was, with this important difference: over the interceding years, she has beautifully articulated her vision in two story collections and, now, a novel.

Indelicacy, out in February from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is a work of feminist existentialism, or existentialist feminism—searching, like Lispector, and lucid, like Camus. The story follows Vitória, a poor cleaning woman at an art museum, who marries into money and begins a journey of artistic self-discovery as she navigates society, friendship, and marriage. It is a novel about class and art, about the roles available to women and the instinct for something more. In 176 nimbly woven pages, it brings together many recurring themes or concerns of Amina’s earlier work, things like looking, walking, art, freedom, self-awareness, silence, and the possibilities of life outside the patriarchy.

This interview was conducted by email over a couple of weeks in December.

INTERVIEWER

There’s a story about how the young Donald Barthelme, wondering what sort of writer he wanted to be, attended an early performance of Waiting for Godot and discovered in Beckett a path toward his own sound. Not his voice or his style, but his sound, like a musician. Like Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk. Miles didn’t just have a style, he reimagined what a trumpet sounds like.

In thinking about what makes your writing unique, the best starting point I’ve come up with is that you have not just a voice, but a sound. I suspect that what I experience as your sound has as much to do with your attitude toward literature as with the particular words you choose to use, so I wanted to ask first about your relationship to writing in this general way—what sort of experience does writing give you and what sort of experiences do you hope your writing will give others?

CAIN

I like imagining Barthelme making this kind of discovery while watching Waiting for Godot. I’m so used to talking about voice and about tone, but I think you’re right, sound more specifically comes into it, too. To consider sound when thinking about fiction is reorienting in a really nice way, and it may actually be what’s drawn me to certain writers, that I’ve heard the sound of their writing so strongly and satisfyingly in my mind. And some stories and novels do that more than others. Sometimes, as a reader, you’re just sinking into the world or space that’s appearing before you, or you’re urged on by the story, but sometimes fiction presents itself in this other way as well, to be heard.

I’m happy to think that my writing has a sound. I certainly hear it when I work, and when writing is going well, I’m pulled along by it. Sometimes I whisper or mutter what I’m writing. With particular sentences, it feels like I am in them somehow, or that they are taking me over, that I am sitting at my desk with them, that they are part of what gives me access to a story. In order to write at all, I suppose I need this kind of experience, to be possessed by something, carried along, and this is what writing gives me, a kind of space that becomes more animate and striking than the physical space I’m in, or that joins with it. And in turn this is probably what makes me continue to write, to have access to this kind of moment, which sometimes feels closer to experiencing a work of music or art than reading. I want the reader to be able to encounter this kind of moment as well, and I hope I’ve been able to do that. On a very basic level, I want to create experience itself for readers, not just a narrative, whatever that experience ends up being for them.

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