February 2, 2023 At Work Space for Misunderstanding: A Conversation between A. M. Homes and Yiyun Li By A.M. Homes and Yiyun Li Photograph of A. M. Homes by Marion Ettlinger. Photograph of Yiyun Li by Basso Cannarsa/Agence Opale. A few times a year, the writers Yiyun Li and A. M. Homes sit down to lunch. As friends, they often find themselves talking about almost anything but writing. Often, though, as they ask each other questions, something interesting and unexpected happens: “The thin thread of a story might be unearthed,” Homes recently told us, “or the detail of a recent experience, or a gnawing question one finds unanswerable. Somewhere between the menu, the meal and the coffee, maybe the story begins to form.” Last year, Li and Homes both published new novels. In Li’s The Book Of Goose, she tells the story of a complex friendship between Agnes and Fabienne, farm girls, who each have been in some way neglected by their families. Homes’s latest book, The Unfolding, is a political satire that explores the fault lines of American politics within a family. At the end of the year, the two friends sat down for one of their lunches—and what follows is a bit of what they talked about. HOMES Funnily enough, as colleagues and friends, one of the things that we never talk about is writing. LI Once in a while I will tell you a story or say something has happened, and you’ll say, “Write that into a story.” That has happened three times. Particularly with the story “All Will Be Well,” as I explained in an interview with The New Yorker: “Sometimes it needs a nudge from another person. I was talking with my friend A. M. Homes one day, and I told her about this practice in California, where we were asked to send care packages to our children’s preschool with a letter, in case of a catastrophic earthquake. She said, ‘You have to write a story about that.’ It had not occurred to me until then, and it turned out that there was a place for the care package in a story.” I think you have a specific talent for saying, “Well, that’s an idea.” There’s an expansiveness to the way you look at the world. Do you look through a telescope or a microscope? Where does it come from? Read More
January 12, 2023 At Work An Angle in My Eye: An Interview with Mary Manning By Olivia Kan-Sperling From Ciao!, in issue no. 242 (Winter 2022). Courtesy of Mary Manning and Canada Gallery. Mary Manning’s portfolio for the Winter issue of the Review documents a summer spent in Italy. Their collages are perfect expressions of the special kind of vision you have on vacation, when everything—pizza receipts, sidewalk seating, wildflowers—looks new and exciting, strangely saturated. Manning’s work not only captures but literally incorporates their world in order to rearrange it, ever so gently, at an angle: in Ciao!, there’s a cantaloupe wrapper and a bag from a pharmacy, plus photographs of their friends, of a Nicola De Maria fresco, and of a performance of a Trisha Brown dance. Manning was born in Alton, Illinois in 1972 and lives in New York City. In 2006, they began sharing digital photographs of their everyday life on their blog alongside scans of objects and links to the work of musicians, filmmakers, writers, and other artists they admire. Today, their work appears in print and on gallery walls across North America. The book Manning was preparing last summer, Grace Is Like New Music, a collection of images spanning ten years of their work, will be published by Canada Gallery in February. We talked about looking at images nonlinearly, as well as Italian graphic design, postmodern choreography, and bags (paper and plastic). INTERVIEWER Do you take photos differently when you’re on vacation? MANNING Yes. For better, for worse, you’re changed when you’re on vacation. There can be a long stretch of time in New York City where I’m just not in the flow of being inspired. When you travel, you’re plucked out of the sky and plopped down on the other side of a huge body of water. You get off a plane and it’s a shock to be in a different light. Read More
December 1, 2022 At Work Does It Have to Be That Way?: A Conversation with Elif Batuman By Maria Dimitrova Elif Batuman in 2019. Photo: Valentyn Kuzan. In September 1852, when he was twenty-three, Tolstoy published his first piece of writing, in a Saint Petersburg monthly. Although it garnered praise, he was upset that the magazine had changed the title to “The History of My Childhood.” “The alteration is especially disagreeable,” he complained to the editor, “because as I wrote to you, I meant ‘Childhood’ to form the first part of a novel.” Like Tolstoy, Elif Batuman always intended to write fiction. One of the essays in her first book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, a collection based on her experiences as a grad student in the Stanford comparative literature Ph.D. program, had originally been pitched to a magazine—and accepted, Batuman thought—as a short story. “I had changed things to protect people’s identities,” she told me earlier this year over Zoom, “but then had to unchange them so they could fact-check it; the alternative was not to be published.” The piece appeared in print as “The Murder of Leo Tolstoy: A Forensic Investigation.” Read More
August 16, 2022 At Work Mountains Hidden by Clouds: A Conversation with Anuradha Roy By Pankaj Mishra Anuradha Roy. Photograph by Gala Sicart. I met the novelist Anuradha Roy in Delhi in the mid-nineties, when she was an editor at Oxford University Press and I had just published my first book. Not long after that, she moved to a Himalayan town to set up Permanent Black, now India’s premier intellectual publisher, with her husband, Rukun Advani. She also began to write fiction. Her fifth novel, The Earthspinner, which was released in the United States this summer, is about the war on reason and on imagination in a world consumed by political fanaticism. Though I don’t remember what was said in our first meeting, I can recall a certain hopefulness in the air—there was a lot of that about, among publishers and writers, in India in the nineties. Writing in English was ceasing to be the furtive and poorly paid endeavor it long had been. There were greater opportunities to publish; new literary periodicals and networks of promotion seemed to be creating the infrastructure for more vigorous intellectual and artistic life. Indeed, the conventional wisdom of that decade, helped by the prominence of Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, and Arundhati Roy abroad, was that Indian writing in English was “arriving,” no less resoundingly than was India’s embrace of consumer capitalism at the end of history. One measure of this apparent progress was the respectful international attention such work elicited. Granta and The New Yorker devoted issues to Indian writing in 1997, the fiftieth year of India’s independence from British colonialism. In 2022, there is something very forlorn about the seventy-fifth anniversary of India’s independence. Murderous Hindu supremacists rule the country, and lynch mobs—physical and digital—police its cultural and intellectual life. Educated Indians spend much of their time and energy trying to emigrate. Literature remains, for a tiny minority, the means to cognition in the darkness, and literary festivals project, briefly, the illusion of a community. But every writer seems terribly alone with herself. The sense of a meaningful shared space and a common language, the possibility of a broad literary flourishing—many of those fragile shoots of the nineties have been trampled into the ground by the ferocious invaders of private as well as public spheres. Over twenty-five years of radical transformations, Anuradha and I have kept intermittently in touch. While emailing in recent months, I began to wonder if other readers should be invited to reflect on the fate of writers in India today. What follows is a conversation that explores some of the historical uniqueness of this fate. Read More
August 5, 2022 At Work If Kim Novak Were to Die: A Conversation with Patrizia Cavalli By Annalena Benini Patrizia Cavalli. Photograph by Mario Martone. I first met Patrizia Cavalli in 2018, in her apartment near Campo de’ Fiori, where we drank tea with honey and talked from early afternoon until sunset. Every surface was covered with books, papers, notebooks, scissors, and scarves, and each bore the same handwritten note, a warning to visitors: “Do not move! If you move anything, I’ll kill you.” Over the course of two years, we had three more conversations, speaking for five hours at a stretch. The apartment had been her home for decades: in the late sixties, as a twenty-year-old philosophy student, she rented a single room there; she had just left Todi, the town in Umbria where she grew up, and in Rome she felt unmoored and lonely. In 1969, through a mutual friend, she met the writer Elsa Morante, who was then working on her novel History. Morante was the first person to look at Cavalli’s poems, and after reading them, she called to say, “Patrizia, I’m happy to tell you that you are a poet.” More than fifty years later, Cavalli’s poems are translated and loved across Europe and the United States. Her first collection, My Poems Won’t Change the World (1974), signaled the forthrightness and disregard for authority that would characterize all her work. Cavalli examines the causes and conditions of pleasure and pain, and the moments in life, often imperceptible at the time, that herald change. Her work explores infatuation, boredom, deception, conflict, grief—all in a poetic voice whose nonchalance belies its artistry. When Cavalli died in June, it felt as though all of Rome wanted to pay tribute. A beautiful ceremony took place at the Campidoglio, where flowers were piled upon flowers. Her admirers and friends crowded the stairwell, and the room where her body lay in state. Cavalli might have criticized the extravagant floral arrangements, but she would have been moved by the words her loved ones chose to speak—some of them her own. Read More
June 8, 2022 At Work Infinite Novel Theory: Jordan Castro and Tao Lin In Conversation By Jordan Castro and Tao Lin Castro and Lin working on their novels in 2019. Jordan Castro’s forthcoming novel The Novelist takes place over the course of one morning in which the protagonist tries to write his first novel. During this time, he sometimes G-chats and emails his friend, Li. Tao Lin’s Leave Society is about someone named Li who is writing a novel documenting his recovery from dominator culture. Castro and Lin have been friends since 2010. This conversation was composed from October 31, 2021 to June 8, 2022 on Google Docs and sometimes on Gmail and G-Chat. That material has been shortened and then reorganized freely to suggest thematic continuities, but also discontinuities, in the time, mood, and medium of the interview. LIN It’s December 19, 2021. Yesterday, I opened the galley of The Novelist and looked for something to quote in my tweet of a photo of it. I flipped around a little and saw and chose this: “I opened Gmail. Li had emailed me again. ‘Fuck off,’ the email said, simply.” I wonder what readers of that tweet—who know my novel’s main character is named Li—thought about that quote. In the context of your novel, the “Fuck off” is playful, causing the first-person narrator of your novel to grin. What’s your narrator’s name? CASTRO I didn’t give him a name. But the name of the protagonist of the third-person, autofictional novel he is initially trying to work on is named Calvin, which is the name you gave to the character based on me in your 2013 novel Taipei. Read More