The Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia is a sparsely populated landmass that sits atop the Pacific Ring of Fire. Forty percent of the land is covered by volcanoes, twenty-nine of which are active. There are earthquakes, hot springs, extreme weather, brown bears, rivers turned blood red from spawning salmon, and vast frozen expanses. Not many people live there, though more do now than did during the Soviet era—Kamchatka was a closed military zone until 1989. There are no roads connecting it to mainland Russia and much of the territory is accessible only by helicopter (or dogsled).

Julia Phillips is the author of Disappearing Earth, a crime novel set in this remote peninsula of the Russian Far East, “sixteen time zones away” from her hometown of Montclair, New Jersey. Phillips, who studied Russian literature in college, went to Kamchatka on a Fulbright in 2011. While there, she spent a month traveling across Russia’s easternmost tundra with the organizers of the Beringia, a 685-mile dogsled race. More recently, Phillips contributed a piece to BuzzFeed about the challenges facing Kamchatka’s nomadic reindeer herders. In all her writing about Kamchatka, Phillips seems most fascinated by the creative potential of emptiness, identifying in the horizonless tundra feelings of awe and dread in equal measure.

Those feelings are written into every page of her debut novel, Disappearing Earth. Told over the course of a year, the story begins with the news that two young Russian girls, sisters Alyona (age eleven) and Sofia (age eight), have gone missing from Petropavlovsk, the capital city of Kamchatka, one August afternoon. As summer draws to an end, and winter settles in, so too do the anxieties of being a woman in an isolated landscape. In Disappearing Earth, Phillips explores the impact the girls’ abduction has on the fabric of this unique community where xenophobia and tensions between ethnic Russians and the indigenous population are all heightened by the disappearance and the criminal investigation that follows.

I spoke with Julia over the phone about her stunning debut, Kamchatka as muse, and the feminist potential of crime fiction.

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Sarah Manguso (left) and Kate Zambreno (right)

Kate Zambreno’s oeuvre is not just a series of books but a body of thought, an uninterrupted exhortation on incompleteness and the intersections of life, death, time, memory, and silence. She challenges my own tendency to treat pieces of writing as discrete objects rather than divisions of consciousness, and I’ve long felt an intimate and continuous access to her mind, so I wanted to ask her about her newest book, Appendix Project, a collection of talks and essays written over the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, her book on her mother, which took her over a decade to write. Her next book, Screen Tests, an excerpt of which appears in the Spring issue of The Paris Review, is forthcoming this July. —Sarah Manguso

MANGUSO

As for publishing a “small, minor book,” to quote you from earlier … maybe we could start there? I keep trying to write a Big Book, a grand book, a centerpiece around which the rest of my books will gather, but either my fear of death or my general inability to be grand prevents this. And I’m almost always more interested in the small, minor books of people’s oeuvres, anyway. You also work in small forms—the appendix, the miscellany, the essay formed from small compositional units and assembled over a long period.

ZAMBRENO

I am more interested in the fragment, the notes, what is ongoing or continuing. My desire in this new writing life of the past few years has been to be small, to stay small, thinking of Robert Walser. To write about what is ephemeral, the daily, and to use it to attempt to think through the crisis of the self and what is beyond the self. When I moved to New York, now six years ago, I felt paralyzed by the prospect of a first-person novel, which I was under contract for, and anxious about publishing’s desire to have the new “big” book, one that everyone talks about, that is on all of the lists, that is part of the conversation, where the self written is assumed to be the same self as the author, and the self is stable, charismatic, and articulate. I felt blocked from the novel for years, I just took notes upon notes, and eventually the novel became about block and paralysis. I thought for a while my sudden longing for smaller forms was a lack of ambition, before realizing that it is my ambition.

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Bryan Washington describes himself as a writer from Houston, but it might be more accurate to say he’s a writer of Houston. His work not only observes the city, it seems to create it anew. The words rustle through the trees and stomp new cracks in the sidewalk. Washington’s fiction and essays range from food, film, and the arts to sexuality, gentrification, and blackness in America. No matter the topic, his work is steeped in Houston, conjuring the city with equal parts empathy and pride to create a distinct feeling of home.

In his debut short-story collection, Lot, an unlabeled map serves as a frontispiece, and the stories, each named after a different area in Houston, fill in the space. Washington’s characters share the same streets, roaming their city and singing a collective history. In the story “Alief,” a neighborhood relishes in the drama of an extramarital affair; “Shepherd” follows a boy sorting through shame and sexuality with a visiting cousin; and a young man finds job security with a veteran drug dealer in “South Congress.”

Throughout these stories lives a recurring narrator, a young man growing up in a rapidly transforming city, sorting through his scattered family, his queerness, and his black Latino identity. Houston is a constant, but as the force of gentrification builds in the wake of Harvey, the narrator is forced to choose between leaving and staying. His transition into adulthood is haunted by the ghosts of people who have left, restaurants that have closed, and muddied baseball fields. In the final story, “Elgin,” Washington writes, “Houston is molting. The city sheds all over the concrete.”

Lot has been enthusiastically anticipated, and stories from the collection have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, American Short Fiction, and Electric Literature. Although these stories stand alone, reading through Washington’s book from start to finish feels significant, like bearing witness to Houston’s erosion. For every thrown fist and quickly whipped comeback, there is a quiet moment cleaning dishes, sitting in the Whataburger parking lot, or sneaking out on a lover in the night. Just as every city is created by its inhabitants, Lot belongs foremost to its characters, who ask to be remembered, even long after their pages have turned.

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An excerpt of Mitchell S. Jackson’s Survival Math was published in The Paris Review’s Fall 2018 issue.

Mitchell Jackson (Photo: John Ricard)

Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel The Residue Years was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and it was the winner of both the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and a Whiting Writers’ Award winner. He is arguably one of America’s most important contemporary voices. For years, readers like myself have been awaiting his next proclamation. His new memoir, Survival Math, arrives not a day too soon amid the political turmoil of 2019. In his second masterpiece, Mitchell has cast aside the fictive cover and turned the lens deeply inward. He delves headlong into issues of race, class, masculinity, love, addiction, and redemption, which unfold into an urgent American odyssey that sweeps history, time, register, and place. His writing is searingly beautiful, self-abnegating, clairvoyant, and brave. Celebratory and confessional, deeply researched and fully realized, he speaks from the gut about the dissolution of family, the disquiet of a country still steeped in deep racial prejudice, and what it means to survive everything, from prison to his mother’s addiction. Survival Math is at once risky and immaculately conceived.

Mitchell is the only person who has invited me to an event so fancy the invitation was flown to my home overnight express. When we attended the awards ceremony, Joy Williams wore her signature cowboy boots and sunglasses onstage. Don DeLillo stared, stone-like, straight ahead. “Hey,” I leaned over to Mitch and asked, “Isn’t that woman handing out awards with her back to us a famous actress?” “You mean Meryl Streep?” he said. We both laughed. This, it seemed, was already his milieu. It was my honor to interview him about his craft.

INTERVIEWER

Survival Math opens with a quote by Baldwin: “That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth—and indeed no church—can teach.” If you could boil it down to one edict, what is it that you most want to teach readers with this book?

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Halle Butler (Photo: Jerzy Rose)

I, a novelist, met novelist Halle Butler in Chicago in May 2017. My girlfriend, also a novelist, was reading with Butler at a café in Logan Square. Halle was standing outside with her friend, a novelist, and they were smoking cigarettes. Butler had on a wrinkled button-down shirt from a thrift store, dirty sneakers, and jeans with holes in them. She seemed wry and friendly. At the time, I don’t think she was aware I was a novelist, but as we talked, I couldn’t stop myself from referring to my debut novel, which had come out a couple months earlier. She smiled in a conspiratorial way, then told me she would have trouble remembering the title because she was already drunk. My girlfriend and I were hungry, so we went inside and ordered gumbo. Halle got up to read an excerpt from her novel-in-progress, The New Me (Penguin). She burped a few times, then announced she was a Granta Best Young American Novelist. Everyone laughed when her narrator admits she is “afraid of the taste of water.” I wondered, who is this Halle Butler person?

I wanted to become her friend immediately. This would be a good place for me to describe, in summary, Butler’s new novel, The New Me, but I hesitate to say that it’s about loneliness, alienation, depression, and friendship. I will say that I experienced waves of empathy for her narrator and her narrator’s anxiety sweat. The New Me is a bold and absurd work of comic genius that dissects social mores, neoliberalism, and consumerism disguised as self-improvement. In other words, Butler and I are kindred spirits and I’m so grateful to have become her friend (when she’s not making fun of me).

INTERVIEWER

First of all, thank you for writing such a beautiful, enraged treatise on living alone in an apartment in Chicago in the winter with one quasi friend and a terrible job. Where did this book begin for you?

BUTLER

I assure you the pleasure was all mine.

I wrote the first few chapters specifically to perform aloud—the intro/overture part, the train scene, the Tom Jordan part. I really like doing readings, but I felt like I’d never totally cracked the code for how to keep people from glazing over, which is definitely a common thing at a reading—getting and keeping people’s attention is really hard, unless they already know you—which, in my case, is often. So I tried first person, lots of potshots, language that would allow me to read in my “irate idiot” party voice. I like it when you feel like you’re witnessing someone interacting with their work in front of you, rather than some kind of self-conscious performance of a reading, if that makes sense. I read the first handful of pages of The New Me at Cafe Mustache in Chicago, in 2016.

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