Q&A with Sofia Samatar
/Dr. Samatar read and discussed her work with students in Roanoke College’s creative writing program on October 22, 2020. Following her reading, Dr. Melanie Almeder, the John P. Fishwick Professor of English and Director of the Roanoke College Visiting Writers and Scholars Program, hosted a Q&A with her. Their discussion is transcribed below.
Melanie Almeder:
It's a joy to welcome Sofia Samatar tonight. She is the author of the novels, Stranger in Olondria, and The Winged Histories, the short story collection Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. Her work has received many honors, including the Astounding Award, formerly the John W. Campbell Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She teaches world literature and speculative fiction at James Madison University. I want to just read you a few things critics have said about her work. NPR named her collection of short stories, Tender, one of the best books of the year and described the stories as daringly exploring the overlap of the familiar and otherness. Carmen Machado, whose reviews of your work I love for their unabashed enthusiasm, described her writing as quote, "perfect," literally perfect. And then she said of Tender, "I have been waiting for a short story collection from Sofia Samatar for what felt like ten million years." And I love that quote because so many of us, when we find your work, it's like I've been waiting ten million years to read something like this. So without further ado, I'll turn the screen over to Sofia Samatar. If you [in the audience] have any questions you would like to ask her, Sofia will read and then we will have a question and answer session. You can start typing any time the questions that you have, thank you.
Sofia Samatar:
Okay, thank you. And from what I understand, … Melanie [is] on the case and will let me know if something is going terribly wrong and you can't see or hear me for some reason. Thank you everyone who is out there. Thank you so much to Roanoke College for having me, to the Visiting Writers program, the Department of English and Communication Studies and the Writing Center. And of course, Melanie Almeder and Mary Crockett Hill. Thank you so much for making this happen. We were going to try it in the spring and the pandemic prevented us. So we're doing it now in a different way. And I'm happy that you're there, that you're out there. I heard there's possibly even somebody in Cairo who's signing on tonight.
I want to start by reading a very brief piece by another writer, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, a wonderful writer who died too young, she was taken from us too young. And she wrote in 1977, a chapbook, an artist's book called Audience Distant Relative. And so I wanted to start by reading a very brief piece from that work, “Audience Distant Relative” by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha:
you are the audience
you are my distant audience
I address you
as I would a distant relative
as if a distant relative
seen only heard only through someone else’s description.
neither you nor I
are visible to each other
I can only assume that you can hear me
I can only hope that you hear me
(Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, 1977)
So that's Theresa Cha in 1977. And, of course, she's writing about writing and the experience of writing something and sending it out into the world to this audience that you don't know. And she imagines this audience as being a distant relative, somebody maybe in another country where your family came from that you've never seen. You've only heard about them, but they're out there somewhere. And I just find this piece very, very resonant now. Certainly, for those of us who, as writers, as teachers, in many different ways, are interacting in this virtual mode, it's like she said: neither you nor I are visible to each other. Well, you're supposed to be able to see me, so I hope you can, but I can't see you. And so I say with Theresa Cha: I can only hope that you hear me.
And what I would like to read to you tonight before we get into some questions and some conversation together—I want to read a few pieces about mythical and imaginary creatures, a long-term preoccupation of mine, one could say an obsession of mine. These are creatures of the imagination. And it could be the individual imagination, they might be creatures that some person made up, or it could be the collective imagination: monsters and creatures of myth and folklore. I've written about them a lot. And lately I've been thinking of them as “the human non-human.” Of course they're non-human--that's probably the most important thing about a monster or a beast of folklore, that they are non-human. They are there to represent the non-human or to get outside of the ordinary human mode. And yet they are not non-human in the same way as cats or coral reefs or bumblebees, right? Those are non-human things that are here in the world with us. The creatures that we imagine and make up only exist within us; they only belong to the human. So they are at the same time absolutely not human and extraordinarily human. There’s nothing more human, really, than these monstrous creatures that only exist in our imagination. I'm going start with an excerpt from a short story called “Selkie Stories Are for Losers.” This is in my short story collection, Tender. A selkie of course is a seal woman, a mythical creature of Scandinavia and the British Isles. She's a shapeshifter, she lives in the ocean and has the shape of a seal. Sometimes she comes on land and sheds her skin, but she’s always looking to get her skin back again and to return to the sea.
So “Selkie Stories Are for Losers.”
***
[Editor’s note: The story has been omitted, but you can read “Selkie Stories Are for Losers” as it was originally published in Strange Horizons.]
***
I'll stop there with that particular story, which is one that uses this mythical creature in order to think about very human experiences--experiences of being in the wrong element, right? The selkie is not in the place where she belongs. And in the story, that becomes a way to think about immigration. It also becomes a way of thinking about other kinds of loss, such as abandonment, because in many of the selkie stories, the woman does have children. And then she has to go back to the sea and she leaves them. So the non-human becomes a way of thinking about very human experience. If you want to buy the book, Tender, and read the rest of that story, that would be excellent. But also if you're not up for that, you can go to the wonderful magazine, Strange Horizons, and you can read it online for free. So if you want to know how it ends, that's the way that you can find that out.
I am going to switch gears now and talk about some monsters. This time, they’re not mythical creatures of folklore, but creatures that are made up by myself and my brother. I hope you can see the screen that I believe I am sharing right now, Audience Distant Relative! And I’d like to read a couple of pieces from this book [Monster Portraits], which was a lot of fun to put together. As you can see from the cover, my brother is a wonderful artist. He does a lot of work with pen and ink. For his day job, he's a tattoo artist in Jersey City. So, if you're in the area, you can mention my name and see if you can get a discount.
Anyway, this is a book that we did together. And the process of the book was that he would draw these creatures that he's so wonderful at creating, and then he would send me the images, and I would write to them. So I would kind of meditate and think about these monsters. And it was a very interesting process because along the way, I mean, in the beginning, I was just kind of trying to make up a story for each monster. But as we continued, I started really becoming very curious about monsters as cultural figures. What kind of work are they doing? Why do they exist everywhere? Why do we need them? What are we trying to say with monsters? What are they doing for us? So I did a lot of research, which was very, very interesting, reading about monsters as a cultural form. And the result was this book, Monster Portraits. And the premise of the book is that we have a journalist and her brother and they are going out to study monsters. I'll read a couple pieces from this.
[Editor’s note: “The Field” and “The Huntress” are omitted, but you can read “The Field” in this excerpt from Rose Metal Press and “The Huntress” as it was originally published in Tin House.]
I think I'll read one more monster piece and then another thing that is not published. So it will be a Roanoke College exclusive! And then we'll have some conversation, some talk. So this next piece, this next little monster portrait that I'm going to read, is called “The Shadow Beast.” And this piece has some quotes, some quotations from other things that I was reading, some of the research that I was doing as I was working on the book. Throughout this book, whenever there are those little pieces of material that I've quoted, it's in italics. And then there are notes at the back that let you know where those quotes are coming from. But you can't see the italics. So I'm just gonna kind of raise my hand when one of those italics appears. And hopefully you can see me on this screen at the same time. I honestly don't know, distant relative!
[Editor’s note: The story is omitted, but you can read “The Shadow Beast,” among other selections from Monster Portraits as they were published in CMW Journal.]
That is what I am going to end with as far as Monster Portraits goes. And then I do want to share something with you that nobody has ever seen before. This is not only something that I wrote recently, but also a fun game you can play. It’s a game the surrealists liked. And what you do to play this game is, you take a newspaper article and rewrite it, giving it a different meaning and sort of transforming it. You use the newspaper article as a jumping-off point. And that's what I did for this little piece which is called “Where Have All the Fairies Gone.” So now we're back to folklore with the fairies.
[Editor’s note: “Where Have All the Fairies Gone” is omitted.]
I'm going to stop there. That is not quite at the end of that piece which, probably not that hard to guess, is based on an article from National Geographic which is about the disappearance of insects. Thank you for listening everyone. I am ready if there are questions.
Melanie Almeder:
There are questions and thank you so much. Before we get started, I heard a rumor, is it your birthday on Saturday?
Sofia Samatar:
It is my birthday.
Melanie Almeder:
Our wonderful reference librarian, who's a magical human being, Piper Combo, texted me that your birthday is Saturday. So we wish you a happy birthday.
Sofia Samatar:
Thank you so much.
Melanie Almeder:
We're glad you're in the world writing. And we do have a number of questions. How about the first one connected to the piece that you read that you worked on with your brother Del? It’s a question about how did the collaboration—or did it—change the way you approached writing? How was it different than writing your own novels and short stories?
Sofia Samatar:
Yeah, that's a great question. One way that it was different in a very, very good way was that there was no blank page. When I started each piece, I had this wonderful image in front of me that I could use to kind of jumpstart my imagination, which is wonderful. And it's something that I think is related to this sort of little surrealist experiment that I was reading at the end there, where sometimes there's a wonderful sense of play that can develop when part of the burden of invention is lifted. And that was something that really happened with Monster Portraits, which made it a pleasure to work on.
Melanie Almeder:
Wonderful, his drawings are just incredibly intricate and beautiful—talk about world-building! Here's another one, someone saying, “I want to thank you so much for zooming in to read to us. Last year I got to read ‘Walkdog’ and I really enjoyed it. I was thinking about the piece you read at the beginning of the webinar and how when we write, we often do so to an imagined, invisible audience. ‘Walkdog’ is almost an epistolary written to an off-screen, off-page teacher character. When you're writing, do you ever write to someone in particular? Or is it more like you write to amuse yourself and move from there?”
Sofia Samatar:
Oh, that's a great question. Well, when it comes to writing, I think amusing yourself is incredibly important. I'm very much for self-indulgence. Often when you do the thing that you really want to do the most, it’s the thing that you think no one will like, right? Because it's so weird that only you like it. But in my experience, that will often have the most reach and touch the most people. So I write for myself, absolutely. But it's also important for me when I'm working on a story to know who is telling this story and why. And I really, really love first-person writing. In fact, in the short story collection, Tender--when we were putting that collection together, my editors and I realized that one of the things these stories had in common was that they were all first-person. And so what I do with that first-person writing is inhabit a character, and that person has something to say, and someone that they want to say it to. I have some stories that are kind of like a journal this person needs to write, they're trying to work something out. I have stories that are letters. I have a story like “Walkdog” that is a paper that’s written for a teacher. So it's not so much that I, as a writer, am writing for a particular someone, but the person who is telling that story is.
Melanie Almeder:
Great, and this is a question that I think is linked to you describing the storytellers. How do you balance out withholding information from a reader and revealing information?
Sofia Samatar:
Yeah, not super well. I tend to err on the side of withholding information. Over time, it's something that I've been teaching myself: to actually give the reader the freaking information that they want and that they're waiting for and not be so subtle. When I’ve had stories published in magazines, very often, the editing comments are, “I don't understand this, this doesn't make sense, why, what, tell us more.” And I have a huge fear of hitting people over the head. Like to me, that's the worst. If I'm going to take a risk, I will always take the risk that you will be totally confused when you read this, rather than the risk of you being like, “Come on, we get it!” That is really, really--I'm like allergic to that reaction. So I think that maybe the best answer to “How do you balance?” is that you just have to let somebody else read it. Give it to somebody else to read. And they'll tell you, they'll tell you where they were confused and where they need more information.
Melanie Almeder:
Right. And we have another question. There are always questions about the role of the extraordinary in the ordinary, but what about the opposite, the role of the ordinary in these stories, in which the extraordinary intrudes?
Sofia Samatar:
Yeah, the role of the ordinary is actually crucial. I think about something like the second Monster Portrait that I read, “The Shadow Beast.” So I wrote it, revised it a couple of times. The last change that I made in it was adding a line very close to the end, which is, “I felt sweaty, gritty, longing for a hotel.” This a very kind of ordinary real-world line. But I think that that is really important, because those details of the ordinary and the daily; they are what ground, they have the power to place you in that strange place in a very, very immediate way. You know what you feel like after you've been traveling and you haven't had a shower. And I think in some ways, actually, fantasy almost needs that more, I think it needs those grounding details almost more than realist fiction, because the reader doesn't have the information, especially at the beginning, to know what it’s like to live in that different sensory world. You can't assume. If you're like, “I walked down the street and I went into the bank,” your reader can fill in a lot of the experience. With fantasy, I think it is on the writer. And we don't see that a huge amount. There’s a lot of fantasy that moves too quickly for me, past those details of the lived experience of a world. But it's something that I prize a lot. I think it's absolutely crucial.
Melanie Almeder:
Here's a great question from the audience. Do you have a favorite monster?
Sofia Samatar:
Do I have a favorite monster? I have a couple of favorite monsters. I actually really liked “The Shadow Beast.” And I liked that piece a lot because I enjoyed writing and reading about nomads. Another one that is a favorite of mine is one who's actually called Nameless. And I don't have her on my PowerPoint, but she's super cool and kind of robot-like and amazing. Partly I love the image, and partly I love this piece, I mean, this is one of those where the reader is probably like, please give me more information, but I like it because it was very free for me to write. I put all kinds of just weird, unexplained details in there. And you know, a monster--I mean one very simple definition of a monster is you take a couple of different things that don't belong together, and you put them together, and boom, you have a monster. And so that was something that I was, in some ways, trying to do with the writing itself. And I particularly enjoyed that process in that story.
Melanie Almeder:
Great, so where did your love for the fantastic or fantasy begin?
Sofia Samatar:
From birth! I don't know. I actually, yeah, I often get asked that question--sort of why fantasy, or where did this come from? Where did this interest come from? I've come up with a lot of answers over the years, and none of them are really that great. I mean, you can talk about growing up feeling like an outsider. I do think there are a lot of people who are drawn to fantasy and science fiction who have had that experience for whatever reason. In my case, being mixed, born in 1971, very soon after it was even legal everywhere in this country for people like my parents to get married. So, kind of, yeah, having this experience, and then my dad's Somali and my mom's Mennonite. It's all just very bizarre and confusing. And so sometimes I think, yeah, maybe that's where it comes from, but then not everybody who has some kind of unexpected background is obsessed with fantasy and science fiction and monsters. So that doesn't really work. I went to a whole bunch of school and did a PhD on the Sudanese writer, Tayeb Salih, and I wrote about fantasy in his work, and I read a whole bunch of critical work on fantasy, and with all of this, to me, the point was that at the end, I would be able to explain to myself, “Why fantasy?” And it didn't work. It allowed me to have the job I have now, that's good. And it was fun. But it did not answer the question that I have.
The other thing I do sometimes when I get the “Why fantasy?” question is just turn it back and be like, why realism? Because fantasy is older and broader. Fantasy is everywhere and always, as far as we know that we've had humans, we know that we've had these stories, we've had fantasy. You realist people started in like 1850! That's like the other day that you showed up! So I think “Why realism?” maybe is the question that we should be asking people who are writing that kind of work.
Melanie Almeder:
Absolutely, when I think about how long selkie stories have been around and how long those hybrid stories have been around in so many cultures. You foregrounded that story in such an interesting way about it—these kinds of stories or these beings being possible figures for that otherness of immigration. Are there other qualities to the fantasy stories that you think work well for talking about, say immigration or otherness?
Sofia Samatar:
I think that these stories work well for describing any kind of experience that is extreme. You don't need a monster if you are talking about, you know, that you're annoyed because the coffee was cold. Why would you create a monster in order to talk about that? You need a monster when somebody left you, you need a monster when everything is ending, when you are afraid the world is ending, when you're scared, when you're angry, when you're experiencing something really intense. I think that that's what fantasy is for, or that's where it becomes useful.
Melanie Almeder:
I was very moved reading your piece about the 13 words that made you a writer. And you quoted, “There was a library and it is ashes. Let its long length assemble.” And you named that letting its long length assemble as part of your being as a writer: how do they assemble? What is your practice like, given this quote?
Sofia Samatar:
Oh, I love that quote so much. This is Gormenghast, this is Mervyn Peake. Everybody just read Mervyn Peake immediately, if you do one thing after watching this! So what's my process? Sorry, I was like dreaming of Mervyn Peake and I lost the question. So the question is about process?
Melanie Almeder:
Well, I mean, just, you focused on that latter part for yourself, for your own writing. Let these long lengths assemble. How do they do so for you? How did the ashes of that library reassemble?
Sofia Samatar:
Yeah, I like it, I like the question put that way. So certainly, the ashes of the library being an element or the element that creates the work, that really resonates for me, because I mean, my books are made out of books. They're a combination of experience and other books. But I almost feel like, if I had to get by without one of those things, I could probably let go of experience and write something that was completely made out of other books, but I couldn't let go of other books, other texts that I constantly kind of ingest and process. That’s huge. That's really the foundation of my work: reading other people's work. I read twice as much as I write, I mean at least twice. If I write, if there's a day when I write for an hour, that's a day I read for two hours. So guess what? When I don’t write for an hour, it’s usually because I don't have two hours to read. So the other thing about letting its long length assemble is that it takes me a very long time to write my books, a very long time. And it's frustrating because I feel like, why? Other people write books really fast, but here I am.
Melanie Almeder:
I wanted to point out to people at this moment two things as well. I love that on your writer's website you have a section where you recommend certain books and there's just a whole range of books there, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Carson's Autobiography of Red. And so I just recommend to our audience to check out that reading list. And also if you're interested in buying more of Sofia Samatar's books, please support indiebooks.org, our small bookstores.
Here's this question that's come up a few times—which is, how has the pandemic impacted your writing and your creativity?
Sofia Samatar:
I'm not sure. I don't think I know the answer to that question. I actually think, maybe that's a question that I'll be able to answer when hopefully we all get on the other side of this thing and I sort of look back, because right now, it's just like, it's a scramble, like it's day-to-day. We're all at home. I'm in the shed in my backyard right now. Like everything is weird. The kids are there, my husband is there and everybody's on top of each other and it's like, nothing is normal. And so it's, I find it just really hard to even see or say. I'm definitely writing, that's still happening. I'm still reading, I'm still writing. But I think, maybe sometime in the future I'll be able to look back and say what was going on here. It's very hard to see in the middle of it. I just have to also say that I am seeing the chat and I see like wonderful, beautiful comments from people. So thank you so much for those. And also I see people that I know that are saying hi and so, yay. And hello, it's great, thank you for being here. And I see you.
Melanie Almeder:
We'll print this for you and send it to you.
Sofia Samatar:
Oh great, thank you so much.
Melanie Almeder:
Yeah, and we have a lot of wonderful questions left, but not a lot of time, we've hit the eight o'clock hour. So I wanted to turn now more to the questions about what to advise young writers, what sort of advice do you give to somebody beginning the writing life?
Sofia Samatar:
Read! Read a lot and read wildly and read eclectically and read stuff that you are not sure you're gonna like, just read, just be an omnivorous reader… I teach literature and not creative writing. So unless it's a reading or something, I'm usually not dispensing writing advice. So I guess, take my advice with a grain of salt because I'm not trained. And when I think about teaching creative writing, I really can't think of a way to do it, except like people come into the class and I'm like, “Read these books. And then at the end of the semester, see if you wrote something.” Because for me, the reading is the most important thing.
I would also like to say--so the other day I was having a conversation with a writer named Kendra Greene, and talking about some writing advice that is very common that I'm not a particular fan of. For example, I'm not a fan of “show, don't tell.” If you have to tell, tell. And I'm also not a fan of “kill your darlings.” I'm like, save the darlings. And that was actually my process of revision--which was a very painful long like five-year revision process--on my first novel. And what I wound up doing at the end was like, I'm going to go find all the things that I cannot bear to part with and all the things I really like, and I'm going to put them together and I'm going to make this book work around those things. And Kendra, when I was talking to her, coined the phrase, “an orphanage of darlings.” And I was like yes! That's a good name for what we're doing here. So I encourage people to be true to your quirkiness and stand up for what you really love, you know? You know what should be in there. And so stand up for it, because probably nobody else will because it's probably really weird.
Melanie Almeder:
That's wonderful.
Sofia Samatar:
But somebody will love it. Somebody will love it.
Melanie Almeder:
And I think you sort of answered this other bright question that came in, which is how do you give your creative imagination permission and how do you give the students’ permission just to be true to their imaginations?
Sofia Samatar:
Yeah, I think that's really difficult. I often feel like I'm playing some kind of head game with myself, where I have to trick myself. I have to trick myself into that state, or I have to get so frustrated that I'm finally just like, forget it! I'm just gonna say this, whatever! And then that kind of winds up being the piece. But yeah, as much as I preach, like, be self-indulgent and stand up for what you love most--sometimes you just second-guess yourself and say well, I don't really have a good reason for doing this so why would I do this? I remember for a long time, I was really drawn to the idea of writing a story with numbered sections. Why? I don't know, I just liked it. I just liked the idea of the numbers. But I was always like, I can't do that unless I have a good reason. So it'd be like, why are there numbers? Why not just sections without numbers? I thought, unless you have a good reason, don't do it. And then after a while, I was like--why? And I wrote a short story and it had numbered sections and absolutely no one was mad. Probably nobody noticed except me. And I had made it into this big thing that I can't do. And then it was like, just do it because you feel like it, you don't have to know why. Let the critics come up with a reason why you did it.
Melanie Almeder:
Wonderful. And on that note, I want to say, we could probably listen to you for hours, but thank you so much for joining this community tonight. I want to thank the 84 people who, and our audience out there, who look like you're coming from all over the United States, from Maine, from Miami, from New York, I see someone from Ireland. So thank you all for coming tonight for this virtual community.…Thank you so much Sofia.
Sofia Samatar:
Thank you, Melanie, and thank you everyone. I still see this wonderful chat stream of people. Thank you so much, all of you, for being my audience distant relatives.
As there was not time to answer all of the audience’s questions,
Sofia Samatar graciously offered to answer the remaining questions via email.
The questions below are compiled from Roanoke College students and guests.
What inspired you to write about the selkies in your story “Selkie Stories Are for Losers”?
I love fairy tales, and I’m particularly intrigued by selkie stories because they’re an outlier within the genre: there’s no happy ending. Or, at best, there’s a bittersweet ending: the selkie is presumably glad to go back to the ocean, but leaves a broken family behind. It feels important to me that, in addition to all the optimistic stories in the folktale tradition, there are also these unhappy ones: stories that acknowledge things don’t always work out—stories that are, in a way, for losers.
What was your process for re-writing the National Geographic article like? Did you decide to re-write an article before finding that particular piece, or did you read the article first and then become inspired to re-write it?
My in-laws gave us a couple of issues of National Geographic last year, at a time when I was having one of my periodical surrealism obsessions (I seem to go through this thing where I get fixated on surrealism every couple of years). I was reading about surrealist games and automatic writing and came across the practice of rewriting a newspaper article or encyclopedia entry. The fun lies in making something fantastical out of a genre that takes itself very seriously, a genre focused on fact. I thought this would be fun to try, and there was National Geographic on the coffee table. Very quickly, I found three articles I wanted to play with (because honestly you can do this with any article whatsoever). I started by sticking pretty close to the article, keeping the sentence structure and replacing words. And then, when the story took off in its own direction, I let it go.
You talked about how the monsters we create are almost more human than we are. Do you think that when you create an original monster it is a reflection of a part of the creator/writer?
Yes, I think so. And because monsters inspire such wildly different feelings—fear, compassion, excitement, etc.—a monster often represents a certain aspect of the creator. If you make a monster, it might represent something you fear about yourself, or something about yourself that you feel deserves protection, and so on.
What is the process by which you create creatures? What sources do you use for inspiration?
Well, when I wrote Monster Portraits I was lucky because I had all these wonderful pictures of monsters by my brother Del to use as sources. He was the one who made them up; I just gave them names. In my other stories about strange creatures, I’ve drawn on folklore (“Ogres of East Africa”), urban legends (“Walkdog”), children’s literature (“Honey Bear”), and classical Arabic poetry (“How I Met the Ghoul”).
Has COVID-19 and lockdown impacted your creative process at all in the past few months? Do you find that more time at home gives you more space to write, or has it made it more difficult?
You know, I was hoping it would make me much more productive as a writer! But then I realized this didn’t make a lot of sense, because worrying about your family, friends, job, country, and world is not actually conducive to the artistic process. I haven’t written less during lockdown, but I haven’t written more, either. I do watch more TV.
What advice would you give a young aspiring poet today?
Read widely. Read voraciously. Read as if your life depended on it; your art does.
What are you reading lately?
Yay, my favorite question! Right now I’m reading Orhan Pamuk’s gorgeous memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City. I’m also reading The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, a very interesting dissertation by Edna Froese called To Write or To Belong: The Dilemma of Canadian Mennonite Story-Tellers, and a German novel, Das Parfum by Patrick Süskind. And I always have an audiobook going: right now I’m listening to George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier.
Books I’ve read and liked recently: The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom; The Baudelaire Fractal by Lisa Robertson; Drifts by Kate Zambreno; My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland; These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy; The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg; Cigarette Number Seven by Donia Kamal; Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales, collected by Angela Carter, obviously; Black and Blur by Fred Moten; The Faerie Devouring by Catherine Lalonde.
