September 7, 2021 At Work They Really Lose: An Interview with Atticus Lish By Matthew Shen Goodman Atticus Lish in Lexington, Ky., on Sunday, May 30, 2021. Credit: Ryan Hermens I have recommended Atticus Lish’s first novel to more people than any other book. Beautiful without being sentimental, brutal without being cruel, Preparation for the Next Life (2014) is a love story between Zou Lei, an undocumented half-Uighur, half–Han Chinese woman, and Brad Skinner, an Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD. “He gets it,” I told fellow New Yorkers: the Jackson Heights bars; the Flushing food stalls; the long walks through outer Queens, past housing projects and storefront mosques and cash-and-carries, all the way to the gas stations and football fields of Long Island. Everyone I pestered into reading the novel was bowled over, from jaded graduate students and sore-eyed copy editors to my mother and my grappling coach. Read More
August 26, 2021 At Work Freedom from Sugarcane Hell: An Interview with Vinod Busjeet By Parul Kapur Hinzen Photo: Sushant Sehgal. I met Vinod Busjeet a few summers ago in Denver, where several of us writers of Indian origin found ourselves together in a workshop at the Lighthouse Lit Fest. I remember thinking his elegance and erudition were impressive. But what lingered in my mind was a detail from the work he had submitted to the class, the closing chapter of a bildungsroman, now published as Silent Winds, Dry Seas. The protagonist, Vishnu Bhushan, takes enormous pride in his delicate hands. A scholarship student from the island of Mauritius, off the coast of East Africa, he refuses a work-study job washing dishes in a Yale dining hall. Manual labor is abhorrent to him. At first, I found his fastidiousness comical. Then I realized that Vishnu dreads working with his hands because he fears it will bind him metaphorically to the servitude of his Indian ancestors on Mauritian sugar estates. “Sugarcane hell” is how one of Vishnu’s cousins, still tied to the land, describes the backbreaking labor of cutting woody stalks of cane. Busjeet’s literary debut at the age of seventy-one is surprising. After leaving Mauritius to study in the U.S., he settled in the vicinity of Washington, D.C., and worked for the private-sector arm of the World Bank, where he focused on developing economies. Far from the corridors of power, his fictional alter ego, Vishnu, grows up in the conflicted world of midcentury Mauritius, part of a rambunctious, feuding clan rising out of poverty into small jobs. Descended from indentured laborers, they live in scruffy neighborhoods among the Creole descendants of enslaved people, escape into drink and the comfort of Hindu rituals, pinning their hopes on their children winning scholarships to study abroad. Unfortunately, little fiction has been produced in English about Indian communities rooted in indenture, though V. S. Naipaul’s brilliant early novels of Trinidad stand out. The British devised this shadow form of slavery immediately after abolishing the African slave trade in 1833, in order to continue reaping profits from their plantations all over the world. More than a million dispossessed Indian villagers were shipped out to far-flung sugar colonies. Overwork and physical abuse crippled the lives of these men and women. Nearly half a million indentured workers landed in Mauritius, laboring for French Mauritian and British planters whose greed transformed the island into the world’s biggest sugar factory for a time. Busjeet’s novel offers a rare view of the society that evolved from this brutish system. In May and June, Busjeet and I spoke by phone and exchanged emails about what it takes to reconstruct a faraway childhood, laugh off old pain, and reckon with the dark legacy of colonialism. INTERVIEWER You turned to writing after a long career in development banking. Did you ever think about becoming a writer early on? BUSJEET In Mauritius, writing was the last thing you’d think of doing. I went to what is considered the best high school there, Royal College, but I don’t recall anyone talking about embracing writing as a career. My father was literate—he knew Shakespeare—but my mother was basically illiterate. She had only two years of primary school. Then, in her old age, she started learning to read and write Hindi. The orientation was making a living, you know? If you were Franco-Mauritian, the world of business was yours. The Hindus, Muslims, and Creoles went into the liberal professions—doctor, engineer, lawyer. Writing was a kind of luxury. Most people I knew didn’t read for pleasure. They read for exams, and once exams were over, they didn’t read. The top writer in Mauritius at the time was a guy called Malcolm de Chazal. He was regarded as a madman. Read More
August 18, 2021 At Work Poetry Is Doing Great: An Interview with Kaveh Akbar By Craig Morgan Teicher Photo: Paige Lewis. Courtesy of Graywolf Press. Enthusiasm is at the heart of Kaveh Akbar’s literary endeavor. Since the publication of his 2017 debut collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, a hyperspeed, ultrasensory journey through addiction, recovery, and spirituality, he’s become one of the best-known poets in America, and that’s saying something in this moment when poetry is suddenly, somehow, cool. But before that, Akbar was already a tremendous presence—a prototypical online influencer, sharing pictures of pages from other poets’ books with his many followers, spreading the gospel far and wide. Calling a Wolf a Wolf was a phenomenon, reaching thousands of readers, many of whom discovered and fell in love with poetry through their feeds. Though Akbar has since left social media, he remains an advocate through his work as poetry editor of The Nation. When I spoke to him over Zoom, he was at an artists’ residency at Civitella, in Italy, and despite the distance and shaky internet connection, we gabbed about the life-or-death practice of poetry like the pair of gleeful nerds we are. Akbar’s second collection, Pilgrim Bell, feels less frantic than his first, though no less intense. There’s lots of white space on the page, and the poems are often cut into short, staccato sections, sentence fragments that accrue emotional power but avoid straightforward narrative or confession. The poems deal with family, religion, love, the wreckage of Trump’s America, and daily life in the highly pressurized environment of the past few years. They feel profoundly intimate to me, as if they seek to reclaim the nuanced language of inner life from all the public noise that threatens it. Reading Akbar’s work and talking with him was a welcome reminder that this art form is soul-sustaining and worth building a life around. INTERVIEWER Let’s start with the idea of poetry as a practice. Is it something you feel you need to do regularly? AKBAR Yeah, I mean it’s never off. Everything that enters my consciousness enters first through the prism of its poetic utility. Were you ever a kid who would hold your shirt out like—I don’t know if you can see it—like this, and you would fill it with stones or shells or whatever? I feel like I’m just moving through the world with my shirt out in front of me, filling it with language and images. And over the years I’ve realized that one hundred thousand percent of the time, if I’m like, “I’ll remember this, I don’t need to write it down,” I forget it instantaneously. So I just write everything down. Read More
August 11, 2021 At Work Language’s Wilderness: An Interview with Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi By Amina Cain Photo: Kayla Holdread. Not many writers can convey both great beauty and horror at the same time, but in Savage Tongues, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi does so deftly. The novel follows Arezu, a woman in her late thirties, as she travels to Marbella, Spain, where she spent the summer when she was seventeen. She has returned to confront the past, the ghost of who she was, and her memories of Omar, an enigmatic older man who introduced her to unfamiliar freedoms even as he harmed her and dispossessed her of her power. Oloomi has written two previous novels, Fra Keeler, a mystery as hallucinatory and menacing as it is comic, and Call Me Zebra, which follows the pilgrimage of a free-spirited exile and autodidact. Though Savage Tongues takes after both, it explores new territory, as Oloomi works through questions of sex, friendship, trauma, and the obliteration of the self, with an inventive approach to time, setting, and character. The language of the new novel diverges, too, and Oloomi’s sentences, whether evoking pain or pleasure, are electric, filled with life. If I’m honest, when I was reading, I often wished I had written them. The imagery is filmic, and sometimes piercing. Take this passage, in which Arezu has just entered her old apartment building in Marbella—“When I pressed the elevator button, I felt Omar’s hand reaching through mine as if our bodies were superimposed: for a moment, my limbs filled with lead. All of the energy and vitality and strength I’d cultivated over the years drained out of me. I felt the pressure of his finger against the illuminated call button and a cold shiver ran down my spine.” This summer, Oloomi and I wrote back and forth to each other over Google Docs. She had just returned from a trip to Turkey, and I’d just arrived in the Catskills, both of us readjusting to movement and travel after having stayed still for so long. We talked, among many other things, about pleasure, self-preservation and survival, and literature that is “raw and ruthless.” INTERVIEWER Savage Tongues is a book of summer. How has this summer been? What have you been doing? OLOOMI It’s been all sorts of ways. I’m directing the M.F.A. program at the University of Notre Dame this year, so work didn’t slow down until mid-June, when I left for Turkey. Like most people, I hadn’t traveled in more than fifteen months, and to go from the static life of quarantine and lockdown to moving across a huge country felt amazing. I spent time in Istanbul and Bodrum. I swam every day. And I ate my heart out. I’m back in the Midwest now, swimming in the lake when I can, though mostly I spend my downtime at a natural horsemanship barn where I lease a horse. INTERVIEWER I’m curious if you’ve read anything lately you especially liked, and also, I’d like to know what you read when you were writing Savage Tongues. OLOOMI I’ve been reading short story collections, mostly. Hassan Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq and Haruki Murakami’s First Person Singular. I like the way that stories can feel like miniature time capsules. When I was writing Savage Tongues I was reading a lot of radical women writers—Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante, Annie Ernaux, Etel Adnan, Maggie Nelson, Nawal El Saadawi. I went to Claudia Rankine, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Judith Butler, Toni Morrison, and Elaine Scarry as I started to think about the politics of discursive violence. Then I read a lot of James Baldwin, Garth Greenwell, and Hervé Guibert—writers who write brilliantly about sex, who are always aware of the power and the politics underpinning a physical or sexual encounter. So I had different stacks of books, different guides to see me through each dimension of the novel. Read More
August 4, 2021 At Work Authenticity and Apocalypse: An Interview with Alexandra Kleeman By Cornelia Channing Photo: Nina Subin. I first encountered Alexandra Kleeman’s work in the pages of this magazine. Her story “Fairy Tale”—published in 2010, when Kleeman was still a student in the M.F.A. program at Columbia University—is a nightmarish account of a woman confronted by a barrage of strangers who all claim to be her fiancé. The one she is forced to choose tries to kill her. Kleeman’s novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine employs a similarly arch and sinister surrealism to tell the story of two roommates whose identities slowly melt into one. In her latest novel, Something New under the Sun, the otherworldly elements lurk further below the surface. The world of the novel is an only mildly exaggerated version of our own, plagued by privatization, corporate conspiracy, and rampant wildfires. The story follows a middle-aged East Coast novelist, Patrick Hamlin, as he travels to Los Angeles to supervise the making of his book into a film—a glamorous vision that is comically upended when, upon arrival, he discovers his primary task will be chauffeuring a demanding starlet, Cassidy Carter, across the menacing California landscape. Due to extreme drought and water shortage, all but the wealthiest Californians have to drink WAT-R, a synthetic substitute for water that is described as being “exactly like the original, except moreso.” Back in New York, Patrick’s wife and daughter have taken refuge at a cultish eco-commune upstate, where they perform rituals to mourn the imminent death of the planet. In confident, understated prose, Kleeman foregrounds the slow-motion catastrophe of climate change and its attendant anxieties, conjuring a simmering unease that recalls fellow genre defiers such as Don DeLillo and Patricia Highsmith. But in the end what’s most troubling about the world of Kleeman’s novel is not its strangeness but its familiarity—how closely its horrors hew to those of modern life. This interview was conducted by phone between New York and Colorado two days after a notorious American billionaire shot himself into space and a few weeks after a patch of ocean in the Gulf of Mexico caught on fire. My conversation with Kleeman made me think deeply about the uncanny moment we are living in and the potential of fiction to offer new and more expansive modes of reality. INTERVIEWER The epigraph of the book is a passage from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in which a man sees a unicorn. At first, he thinks he must be dreaming or having some kind of mystical experience. But then another person comes along and sees it, too, and then another, and somehow these witnesses reduce the specialness of the experience until it is “as thin as reality,” transforming the unicorn into something ordinary—“a horse with an arrow in its forehead.” Why did that feel like the right way to open the novel? KLEEMAN I have a long relationship with the play Hamlet. It is the thing I have seen performed the most times in my life, and it was an important touchstone for me in several different ways while writing Something New under the Sun. First, it manifests this theme of telling and retelling and substitution and change by parts that I think is an important part of the logic of the novel. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern also asks this question about whether or not perceiving inaccurately is helpful to us in terms of our psychological stability and our survival, which I think is one of the main questions of this book. We often perceive correctly in a localized way. We can accurately name what is happening in our daily lives, or perform a very complex analysis of a TV show we are watching. But the larger context in which we operate—the capitalist economy, the ecosystem, which is under extreme pressure and is changing in ways that are stochastic and nonlinear—is often beyond our emotional comprehension. I think a lot about whether our models of reality enable us to function usefully in a world that is changing as quickly as the one we occupy. Read More
July 29, 2021 At Work The Things We Hide: An Interview with Megan Abbott By Rebecca Godfrey Photo: Drew Reilly. “Ballet was full of dark fairy tales,” Megan Abbott observes in her new novel, The Turnout, noting that “how a dancer prepared her pointe shoes was a ritual as mysterious and private as how she might pleasure herself.” These mysterious and private rituals of young women—these “dark fairy tales”—are at the heart of Abbott’s work. Over the course of ten novels, she’s explored the violence and crime that pervade American girlhood. In Dare Me, competitive cheerleaders become suspects in a murder case. In The Fever, an outbreak of illness is tied to the “enigmatic beauty, erotic and strange” of a small-town high school. While undoubtedly one of our best crime novelists, Abbott has also always struck me as akin to an anthropologist; she not only explores the hidden subcultures of teenage girls but reveals the coded language and shared ethos of their cliques and sects, the way their secrets are not merely secrets but a means of expressing forbidden eroticism, dreams, and rage. In The Turnout, Abbott delves into the rarified world of ballerinas, astutely noting the symbols and signals underlying the romantic image. “There was such a boldness to this girl, a barbarism to her,” she notes. “This pink waif, her tidy bun.” While she may have the gaze of an anthropologist, Abbott, in fact, began as a Ph.D. student studying film noir at NYU. Her first book, published in 2002, was a prescient work of critical theory, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir. Reading Chandler and Hammett, she’d often wondered, What would happen if the femme fatale told the story? She wrote her first novels, including Bury Me Deep and Queenpin, as sly, meta takes on pulp fiction, with alluring, often menacing women as protagonists. With 2011’s The End of Everything, Abbott began to write about the violence of seemingly all-American girls in seemingly all-American suburbs, gaining not only a wider audience but numerous Edgar Awards and admirers among crime writers. The Wire’s David Simon invited her to be a staff writer on The Deuce, alongside Richard Price and George Pelecanos. More recently, she wrote and coproduced a television adaptation of her novel Dare Me and is now doing the same for The Turnout, while also working on a television series with The Queen’s Gambit’s Scott Frank. I caught up with Abbott over email during a sultry, tense summer, a summer that felt increasingly Abbott-esque. Boldness and barbarism were everywhere. Heat waves and wildfires seared and scarred. A mysterious illness continued to cause infection and fear, a former America’s sweetheart vowed revenge against her father, angrily confessing a desire to “send him to jail,” while in the music video for the song of the summer, an eighteen-year-old singer posed as a cheerleader easily turns a boyfriend’s bedroom into a sea of flames. INTERVIEWER What drew you to write about ballerinas in The Turnout? ABBOTT When I was seven or eight, I took ballet classes at this strip mall dance studio where two sisters—twins, actually—were the main teachers. They were so beautiful, in that classically ballet way, and seemed to contain mysteries. I was fascinated by them, their bodies, their rigor, their coolness and elegance. And their wordless exchanges with each other. I wondered what they were like out of the studio. Did the coolness ever slip? Did they have grand romances? Were they close? Growing up in suburban Detroit, I was always yearning for a glamour that felt just beyond, and they seemed to embody everything I longed for—mystery, exoticism, self-containment. And they looked like they held secrets. They became the spark. Read More