Photo: Ruvin De Silva. Courtesy of Hogarth Books.

It is no exaggeration to call Anuk Arudpragasam’s first novel absolutely devastating. The Story of a Brief Marriage depicts Dinesh, a sixteen-year-old Tamil man—and yes, at sixteen Dinesh is in many ways a man, forced into a premature adulthood—in a refugee camp toward the end of the Sri Lankan civil war. Though Arudpragasam’s second book is more removed from the bodily experience of violence as portrayed in his first, the war still hangs heavy over the scope of the new novel. A Passage North, an excerpt from which appeared in the Fall 2019 issue of this magazine, follows Krishan, a Tamil man who grew up outside of the war zone, as he makes his way north from Colombo to attend the funeral of his grandmother’s caretaker. It is an incredibly introspective work. Through the particularities of Krishan’s experience and inner life, Arudpragasam seamlessly unfurls ruminations on intimacy, trauma, and the passage of time.

The contemplative nature of A Passage North makes sense—Arudpragasam wrote the novel while studying for a Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia University. While the war and its legacy are central to his work—they are “an obsession,” he says, and he looks forward to the day that he can write about something else—so, too, are the realms of literature and ideas. This came through in our lengthy conversation, which lasted nearly two hours. Arudpragasam jumps from novels to the politics of caste to philosophy to Sanskrit poetry to Tamil-language writing and back again with ease, drawing on stories, texts, and cultural history to illustrate his thinking.

There are currently about three million Sri Lankan Tamils, Arudpragasam told me, nearly half of whom live outside of the country. Arudpragasam is part of this diaspora. When we spoke over Zoom in early May, he was in Paris, where he is working on his third novel during a yearlong fellowship with the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination. At the time of our conversation, the anniversary of the end of the war—a day that Arudpragasam, along with the rest of the Tamil community, commemorates each year—was fast approaching. Although he claims to be an impatient reader and writer both, Arudpragasam strikes me as patient, generous, and, above all, thoughtful, choosing his words carefully and often taking time to cultivate an idea. What resulted was the following much-abridged conversation, in which we discuss his work, influences, and process.

INTERVIEWER

What was your entry into writing fiction?

ARUDPRAGASAM

I didn’t come from a book-reading household, so my entry into books was arbitrary. It happened to be through philosophy books that I found at a bookshop close to my house. The first book I read was Plato’s Republic. Then it was Descartes’s Meditations and a book of lecture notes of Wittgenstein’s called The Blue Book. I tried to read Aristotle’s Ethics, but I stopped that after a while. I read a lot of philosophy when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, before I went to university. That was my entry into literature—I only really started reading fiction when I was in college. There was one book in particular, The Man without Qualities, by Robert Musil—he actually had a Ph.D. in philosophy. He has these long, digressive, essayistic sections in his book, which I haven’t read since I was twenty, so I don’t know how I’d feel about it now. At the time I was very moved by the way he places philosophical questioning and response in a kind of living, bodily situation. Philosophical problems arise in lived context, in response to real situations, and in philosophy, academically, you don’t really ask or answer questions in that way. But I read that book, and it showed me that there was a place in fiction and novels for a lot of what interested me about philosophy. Actually placing these things in their lived context charges philosophy in a way that simply discussing them abstractly does not. So I read that book, and I decided that I would like to write fiction, that I wanted to be the kind of person who could write a book like that. Read More

Keith Ridgway. Photo courtesy of New Directions.

The central chapter of Keith Ridgway’s latest novel, A Shock, takes place in The Arms—a South London pub that serves as a gathering place for many of the book’s characters. “The Story,” as the chapter is titled, is about local patrons regaling one another with anecdotes, all of which speak either directly or obliquely to the stories in the surrounding chapters or to the novel at large. In one tale, a bird flies as high as a mountaintop, where its heart gives out, and it drops, only to take another flight to those same mountainous heights—“Stuck in a loop. Doing the same thing again and again.” So, too, does this novel deal in loops, reinventing itself with every chapter while following familiar characters and themes, collapsing at its center only to unfurl again, opening with “The Party” and closing with “The Song,” which takes place at the titular celebration of the first chapter.

A Shock is an artful exercise in nervous revelry. There is an exciting, almost voyeuristic quality to the reading experience, a bit like wandering slowly through the very house party Ridgway depicts. The novel features an exquisitely arranged guest list of characters. A woman spies on her neighbors through a hole in the wall. Another habitually invents elaborate personal histories. A man obsesses over what might have happened to the former tenants of his apartment. And Ridgway makes a wonderful master of ceremonies, introducing each character in turn and nodding to the many connections between. His language is realistic yet defamiliarized, balancing a fealty to the many flaws inherent in natural modes of expression and the writerly necessities of successful storytelling, rendering confusion with narrative clarity and imprecision with the utmost intention, so that dialogue may drift in and out of earshot, perspectives may shift, details may gain or lose focus as faces emerge or fade from the crowd, but always in service of honest conversation and never at the expense of a good time.

Ridgway is from Dublin. In addition to A Shock, he is the author of the novels Hawthorn & Child, Animals, The Parts, and The Long Falling, which was adapted as the 2011 film Où va la nuit. His writing has earned him the Prix Femina Étranger, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and the O. Henry Award. He lives in London. As much as I would have loved to attend an actual party at the Ridgway place, this interview was conducted over the phone, over the static of the Atlantic, over one evening this past April.

INTERVIEWER

I’d like to start with the idea of the middle. Your latest novel, A Shock, finds characters trapped in an attic, introduced in medias res, and literally squeezed through a gap between walls. What brings you to write toward these liminal spaces?

RIDGWAY

Well, that’s where we live. In the gaps. In this book there are characters who are trapped or stuck or separated in various ways. Sometimes, as you say, literally. Stuck in a building or in part of a building. But also, there are characters trapped in looped thinking, or in poor housing, terrible work, and the political gap that allows those things. I’m not sure I’m all that interested in the spaces themselves, but I am interested in the people. And among them are others who seem less trapped. Who seem somehow to have more freedom of imaginative movement, based on something in themselves, a sort of ability to walk through things. I was interested in all these people. Read More

Photo: Edward Friedman.

Clare Sestanovich’s short story “By Design,” which first appeared in the Spring 2020 issue of this magazine, features the unforgettable Suzanne, a woman facing accusations of sexual harassment, going through a divorce, and struggling to accept her adult son’s independent life. In the opening tableau, she sits across from her future daughter-in-law at a restaurant. Suzanne keeps her criticism of the impending marriage to herself but outwardly betrays a deep, unspoken malaise. She consumes an entire basket of bread by soaking each bite in red wine, as if gorging on the sacrament.

In Objects of Desire, which includes the story, Sestanovich revitalizes James Joyce’s style of “scrupulous meanness”—depicting the setting and inhabitants of her narratives in an ultrarealistic, if sometimes unforgiving, light. Moments of epiphany, or at least self-understanding, accompany everyday activities. Suzanne, for example, finds solace not in a major dramatic resolution but in the acquisition of a houseplant. But Sestanovich engages more self-consciously with a matriarchal literary lineage. Her steady hand and bone-clean prose recall such foremothers as Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, and Jhumpa Lahiri. She weaves each narrative around universal trials of womanhood. Through hysterectomies, miscarriages, and unstable relationships, her cast of canny protagonists come to terms with their wants and needs.

Over the past year, Sestanovich has continued to release new work in Harper’s, The Drift, and The New Yorker, where she is an editor. Her characters provided me companionship throughout the solitude of quarantine, and the publication of her full-length debut this week coincides with our uneasy communal reemergence. Sestanovich’s stories about social encounters—meeting strangers on flights, striking up conversations with bartenders, sitting through dinners with in-laws—feel eerily appropriate for this moment of easing back into the world.

Sestanovich and I corresponded by email in the weeks leading up to the publication of Objects of Desire. At the start of our conversation, she reminded me that we had attended the same Quaker prep school. There, students met for worship every week, sitting in silence to await communion with God or one another. This got me thinking about how such veneration of silence might have affected the emergence of Sestanovich’s voice as a writer. Her stories are built around what is waiting to be said—the desires that remain unspoken or held within.

INTERVIEWER

I loved the piece you wrote for The New Yorker earlier this month about chance encounters. The city is “a cartography of a shared world that does not insist on bringing everyone together,” you write, adding that “in parting ways, we are still imparting something of ourselves.” You structure many of your stories around chance and coincidence as well. What purpose, what friction, do passing encounters bring to a narrative?

SESTANOVICH

“Don’t insist on bringing everyone together” is actually a pretty good distillation of my views on plot—though when it comes to hosting a dinner party, I promise I’m more conscientious about togetherness! There’s a certain narrative tidiness that coincidence, if used well, can helpfully disrupt. A lot of us have expectations, in both life and fiction, about the hinges on which our stories are going to turn—you know, the moments the Hallmark aisle tells you to commemorate. Births, deaths, all the things you’d throw parties about. Read More

Photo: Marion Ettlinger.

At 248 pages, Joshua Cohen’s latest novel, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, is slim by his standards. His 2010 comic novel Witz comes to 824 pages. Book of Numbers is just shy of 600. Beyond page count, there is an instantly recognizable intensity to Cohen’s writing, and in this respect, too, The Netanyahus is a bit of an outlier, for it unfolds with the ease of an anecdote, a comic—if cautionary—tale.  

Published in the U.S. this week by New York Review Books, the novel follows a series of events surrounding a job talk in 1960 by the conservative religious historian Benzion Netanyahu at a small college in upstate New York. The narrator is the liberal economic historian Ruben Blum, who is assigned to take charge of Netanyahu’s campus visit, despite not knowing his work, because he is the only Jewish member of the faculty. Netanyahu unexpectedly brings his family along, and their encounter with Blum’s family is about equal parts farcical and disturbing. There are a few other plot points and some significant digressions, including two inserted letters and a fully delivered speech. But all of it comes together in a kind of playful package that I found more congenial—or differently congenial—than Cohen’s previous work.

In the afterword, we learn that the novel is based on real-life events told to Cohen by the literary scholar Harold Bloom, toward the end of Bloom’s life. Ruben Blum is a stand-in for Harold, the Blooms really hosted the Netanyahus, and so on. How much of the rest is true is unclear, for out of Bloom’s anecdote Cohen has crafted a story about two Jewish families half a century ago that is also an inquiry into the religious and political tenets upon which Netanyahu’s son—the famous Benjamin—would later reshape modern Israel. The result is a surprising hybrid, a learned and investigative novel that retains some of the feeling of a story shared by friends. Over and over, Cohen reconfigures the space between artifice and autobiography, between irony and earnestness, between what’s made up and what’s real, and how each of those modes offers its own understanding.

Cohen is the author of six novels, four story collections, and Attention, a collection of essays and criticism. I met him more than a decade ago, when I was the associate director of Dalkey Archive Press, and he and I hustled around New York promoting Witz. We became friends, and have grown as friends, mostly by talking about books we like. We also both spent part of our distant pasts working as musicians on cruise ships, and I would like to think that over the years we’ve quietly bonded over the fact that neither of us ever brings that up.

I interviewed Cohen by email in May and early June 2021. I told him ahead of time that I wanted to discuss Judaism as subject matter, the use of nonnarrative material in a narrative work, and varieties of comedy and irony, in that order.

INTERVIEWER

When Book of Numbers came out, in 2015, you told me you were done writing “Jewish books.” You’d written Witz, a very Jewish book, then Four New Messages was not a particularly Jewish book, nor was Book of Numbers. But later you wrote Moving Kings, an arguably very Jewish book, and now The Netanyahus, inarguably Jewish. Maybe this is a question about subject matter in general, the things we return to, but I’m interested in why you feel drawn back to this one.

COHEN

You know about the covering cherub? God dwelled in the holy of holies in the Temple in Jerusalem, and because God can’t be experienced directly—because direct experience of God will destroy a mortal—a cherub, or actually two cherubs in some accounts, was employed to hang out there, covering the presence of God with its wings. This was originally in Ezekiel, and though I’m sure I encountered it there at some point in my life, I only really noticed the cherub because of Harold Bloom, whose writing about it didn’t come from the Hebrew either, but from Milton and Blake. It was Milton and Blake who’d turned this cherub singular and associated it with Satan—the angel that covers God, that covers for God and, made overproud because of the privilege, falls. Bloom turned the covering cherub into the artist, the writer, who absorbs the divine light and filters it for the rest and, in doing so, suffers. Why am I bringing this up? Because it’s beautiful, in its cracked romantic way, but also because the process by which this beauty came to me is a model. Here is a figure from what I might call my tradition—Ezekiel, which I had to read at school—that hadn’t meant anything to me until, once Miltonized and Blaked, it Bloomed. This is typical, I think. We don’t know what pasts we have until other traditions absorb and filter them—in this case, a pair of English poets acting as covering cherubs for cherubic Harold. And now here I am, cherubing for you—telling you that after every book I finish, I declare myself “done.” (Mrs. Geller, my fifth-grade teacher of Bloomian proportions, used to remind me, “Turkey is done, a person is finished.”) After Four New Messages, I was “done” with technology, but then I wrote Book of Numbers. After Moving Kings, I was “done” with the Jews, but then I wrote The Netanyahus. At this point, I think declaring myself “done” means “I’ll have another.” Read More

Photo: Bríd O’Donovan.

In the work of the Irish writer Doireann Ní Ghríofa, history is amorphous, a living thing that frequently bleeds into or interrupts the lives of those in the present day. “The past has come apart / events are vagueing,” reads the Mina Loy epigraph that begins Ní Ghríofa’s sixth collection of poetry, To Star the Dark, published earlier this year. In A Ghost in the Throat, a hybrid of autofiction and essay first published by Dublin’s Tramp Press and out this week in the U.S. from Biblioasis, she writes, “To spend such long periods facing the texts of the past can be dizzying, and it is not always a voyage of reason; the longer one pursues the past, the more unusual the coincidences one observes.”

A Ghost in the Throat served as my introduction to Ní Ghríofa’s writing, and it is a work I have returned to repeatedly over the months since I initially encountered it, mulling over its questions of history, motherhood, obsession, and the porousness of time, place, and identity. The book twines together Ní Ghríofa’s harrowing experience following the birth and near loss of her fourth child with the life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman who, upon discovering her husband’s murdered body, drank handfuls of his blood and composed an extraordinary poem lamenting his loss. “When we first met,” writes Ní Ghríofa, “I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries.” What follows is a tale of love across eras, as Ní Ghríofa painstakingly devotes herself to researching the overlooked pieces of Ní Chonaill’s life and translating her “Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire.” The poem appears in its entirety at the book’s end, translated from the Irish by Ní Ghríofa herself.

The following conversation happened over Zoom in early April from my living room in Brooklyn and Ní Ghríofa’s home in Cork. Even through the screen, Ní Ghríofa is a warm and inviting presence, leaping up frequently to grab books from the stuffed shelves behind her and reading snatches of poetry aloud to illustrate her points. At the time, Ireland was in the midst of its fourth month in severe lockdown due to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis while New York was beginning to announce its vaccination process. Since then, both the U.S. and Irish governments have eased restrictions, and as time moves forward, it is strange to think that this moment of global crisis and fear is, for some parts of the world, beginning to vague into history, too.

INTERVIEWER

A Ghost in the Throat is your first book-length work of prose. Why did you choose prose specifically for this work?

DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA

I suppose I feel as though the form chose me. When I reflect on the path to writing this book in terms of craft, I’m struck by how often I felt driven by the book itself rather than vice versa. I felt as though the book were showing me the form it needed to be in, and because this is my first work of prose, that was very unfamiliar to me. There were points in the process where I felt as though I should be more in control, but anytime I tried to fight against that sense of a natural unfolding, the process very quickly taught me that resisting was a mistake. The book became itself when I was able to relinquish that sense of control. I know how frustrating it is, as a writer, to read interviews where people articulate their process like that. “This character just wanted to be who they were”—it can be irritating to hear authors speak like that, and yet, this is simply the truth of this book’s becoming. It insisted on itself. Read More

Black Thought. Photo: Erica Génécé.

In 2016, wearing a white shirt with tiny embroidered roses, Black Thought centered himself in front of a whispering audience at the Harvard Innovation Labs. He had just finished a conversation with host Michael Keohane about the hand-painted clothing he’d made as a young artist, his rise within rap music, and his eventual aspirations as an actor. To the delight of the campus crowd, he asked, “I can kick a rhyme?” Nudging up his glasses, he then unleashed five minutes of complex stanzas, double entendres, and expository verses. Somewhere within the burst of sentences, he veered into the biographical. “I got to see how gangstas played at such an early age. What my father was into sent him to his early grave. Then mom started chasing that base like Willie Mays … Trouble was my ball and chain.” And then, after a pregnant pause—“Black Thought is what that all became.”

Despite almost three decades of recorded material and myriad rhymes, Black Thought has remained low-key about his life offstage. Black Thought, a.k.a. Tariq Luqmaan Trotter, grew up alongside hip-hop itself. His first purchase at a record store was Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock. His early love of rap music gave way to an enduring interest in the written word. “I remember thinking how much I just loved writing,” he says. “I’d write all kinds of things down all day long. I was around nine years old when I tried to write my first rhymes.”

He spent his formative years at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts. During this time, a chance encounter with a young drummer, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, would change the trajectory of both their lives. The two, along with the rapper Malik B., formed the Square Roots, a name shortened to just the Roots by the time their first release, Organix, arrived in 1993. Running counter to hip-hop’s celebrated history with sampling, the Roots became known for their use of live instruments and a rotating lineup of band members. They experimented with sampling more in their later work, but live instruments were foundational to their ascent, and word spread about their exuberant stage show.

Their 1995 album, Do You Want More?!!!??!, and its 1996 follow-up, Illadelph Halflife, were springboards that took them around the globe for the next fourteen years—world tours, Woodstock, television, film, their very own music festival, even the White House—all of it halting somewhat when they became the house band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in 2009 (and eventually The Tonight Show). Collectively, the Roots have amassed more than twenty studio projects, live works, compilations, collaborations, and more. They’ve been nominated for fourteen Grammy Awards and won three, including one in 1999 for their juggernaut single “You Got Me.”

Throughout the Roots’ expansive catalogue, we’ve witnessed Black Thought’s maturation as an artist, his gravelly, aging voice and renewed boldness on recent material, all of it quite fitting of his sage persona and increasingly sermonic verbiage. There’d long been attempts made at solo projects over the years, but a perfect storm of industry semantics and gridlock deadened many would-be albums. The Roots’ Phrenology in 2002 was in fact a project whose entire framework was built around sketches intended for Black Thought’s solo debut. Phrenology signaled that Black Thought was undeniably emerging into his own, and his peers were taking notice.

In 2018, he released Streams of Thought, Vol. 1, the start of what has become a series of solo projects, each recorded with different producers. As expected, the Streams of Thought series represents a deviation from the material Black Thought has recorded with the Roots. Here, he’s more inward, more confessional, touching on topics like his family and his anxieties as an artist. To date, there have been three volumes, but a fourth is afoot—it seems to be ongoing, a living document that he’s committed to for the longterm. “Am I a journal or journalist? Olympic tournament–level genius author? Affirmative,” he rapped in a 2020 NPR Tiny Desk performance, sitting stoically in house slippers and dark glasses. He’s also been working on a Broadway adaptation of George Schuyler’s 1931 Afrofuturist satire Black No More, which he’s producing, writing music and lyrics for, and costarring in.

From our respective corners of the country, Black Thought and I spoke a couple of times over the past year, discussing watershed moments of his artistic growth, important Roots history, and the nucleus of his whole enterprise: his use of language and the written word.

INTERVIEWER

What are your earliest memories of rap music?

BLACK THOUGHT

I’m about the same age as hip-hop itself. Kool Herc and those guys started going back and forth on disco breaks in July or August of 1973, and I was born in October of that year. I was invented just a couple months after the breakbeat was invented. Some of my earliest memories are of breaks being spun at disco parties in the neighborhood. Music-wise, record-wise, though, it would be “Rapper’s Delight,” whenever that hit.

INTERVIEWER

When did your interest in writing begin? What sparked it?

BLACK THOUGHT

I was nine years old when I started writing. A rapper named RC LaRock got popular and really made an impression on me. He made me want to write actual rhymes. In 1980 he had a song called “Micstro” that was a huge influence in regards to my style. Then “Superrappin’,” by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, came out, and they did a particular style that was comparable to what the girl group JJ Fad popularized on the song “Supersonic.” Then Kool Moe Dee and the Treacherous Three came out and influenced me a lot, too. But I remember “Superrappin’ ” in particular because it’s a serious record that starts out at a moderate pace. By the end of it, the verses are lightning fast. I wanted to write my first song in that same cadence. Read More