Will > Books: books-of-the-year-2023‎ (12)

What makes a person the same person over time? Is it our consciousness, the what-it’s-like to be us? Is consciousness like a light that’s either on

What makes a person the same person over time? Is it our consciousness, the what-it’s-like to be us? Is consciousness like a light that’s either on or off?

What remains of a person once they’ve died? It depends on what we choose to keep.

I always understood my father’s desire to resurrect his father’s identity as being connected to two different kinds of trauma. One is the loss of his father at a young age in a common but tragic scenario, with heart disease. The other trauma is this loss of a whole culture. Jewish life in Vienna was incredibly vibrant. Literally overnight it was lost. The suddenness of that loss was profound, and it took me a while to appreciate that. My great-aunt Dorit, who died this past year at 98, said they were following all the arbitrary protocols of the Nazis to save all this documentation. Saving documentation is an inheritance in my family that is a response to that traumatic circumstance. - from the PW interview

I used to wonder if I could wake up into a different self. For all I knew, it could have happened every morning. A new self would have a new set of memories.

AMY KURZWEIL is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir. She was a 2021 Berlin Prize Fellow with the American Academy in Berlin, a 2019 Shearing Fellow with the Black Mountain Institute, and has received fellowships from MacDowell, Djerassi, and elsewhere.

She has been nominated for a Reuben Award and an Ignatz Award for “Technofeelia,” her four part series with The Believer Magazine. Her writing, comics, and cartoons have also been published in The Verge, The New York Times Book Review, Longreads, Literary Hub, WIREDand many other places. Kurzweil has taught widely for over a decade. See her website (amykurzweil.com) to take a class with her.

In the next town over, a man had killed his family. He’d nailed the doors shut so they couldn’t get out; the neighbours heard them running through

In the next town over, a man had killed his family. He’d nailed the doors shut so they couldn’t get out; the neighbours heard them running through the rooms, screaming for mercy. When he had finished he turned the gun on himself.
Everyone was talking about it – about what kind of man could do such a thing, about the secrets he must have had. Rumours swirled about affairs, addiction, hidden files on his computer.
Elaine just said she was surprised it didn’t happen more often.

For months now she has been having the same dream Of a flood that sweeps through the house Carries off clothes from the wardrobes Toys from the cupboards Food from the table In the dream she is trying to stop it She is wading around, pulling things out of the water But there’s too much to hold in her arms and it overcomes her The current grows stronger Pulls away the appliances the kitchen island tiles from the floor paint from the at the edge of the water watching her go Staring down as she’s swept past In their eyes she is old Her youth is gone too It has all been washed away by the water

You couldn’t protect the people you loved – that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering. He said I love you to his wife and it felt like a curse, an invitation to Fate to swerve a fuel truck head-on into her, to send a stray spark shooting from the fireplace to her dressing gown. He saw her screaming, her poor terrified face beneath his, as she writhed in flames on the living-room carpet. And the child too! Though she hadn’t yet been born, she was there too. All night he listened to her scream in his head – he couldn’t sleep from it, he just lay there and sobbed, because he knew he couldn’t protect her, couldn’t protect her enough…

When Dad was fun everything was fun. Not just holidays, not just Christmas. Going to the supermarket! Cutting the grass! At bedtime they had pyjama races, they read Lord of the Rings cover to cover, they put a torch under their chins and told each other ghost stories…

Some people might say that the key problem is with coming back from the dead specifically. Because obviously death is a pretty serious step with all kinds of long-term effects that you’re not going to just shake off. But lately you’ve noticed it with other things too, that even though they never actually died, when they came back from where they’d gone they were still completely changed.

…is it worth taking the risk? Sometimes? If you could still sort of see the person they were and you thought maybe there was still enough time, if you knew what to do or say?

…the pesticide the farmers use on plants contains a neuro-toxin that destroys their memory so they forget their way home, can’t make it back to the hive where they live, and that’s why they’re dying out. When they looked in the hives they found them not full of dead bees, but mysteriously empty. Maybe that’s what happened to Cass, you think. Maybe air pollution in the city has damaged her brain and now she’s forgotten her home. Though really you know it started way before she came here.

I wrote Imelda’s section, and I knew she was on her way to this dinner… I wrote that first line like she, well, she needs to use the bathroom really urgently. And I put commas in and a full stop. And it did not feel right at all. The only way to write it was without the punctuation, and I wanted it to feel like you’re in her head. She doesn’t parse things in the same educated way that Dickie or indeed the kids would do. She just thinks in this much more immediate, intensive way. When you go from the kids’ sections into Imelda’s section, I wanted it to feel like, woah, there’s a change in gear here. Like there’s something’s going on that hasn’t been apparent up until now. At this moment in her life, but maybe at every point in her life, everything feels extremely precarious. She’s on this knife edge, all the time. She always feels like everything’s going to collapse, the floor is going to disappear from under her and she’s going to just tumble down into the past with her abusive dad and the poverty and the grimness and stuff. - from the. Hindustani Times interview

Nature in her eyes was almost as bad as sports. The way it kept growing? The way things, like crops or whatever, would die and then next year they came back? Did no one else get how creepy that was?

or

Behind him, another boy, not as tall but slightly droopier, had started kissing Elaine. It was distracting; it seemed like she could hear it even over the metal, a squelching noise like walking on frogspawn.

or

It feels weird reading a prayer off his phone, where he has looked at so many unreligious things. He hopes the Virgin Mary knows it’s meant for her, that he’s not praying to e.g. Candy Crush or Pornhub.

Ireland is a place where people are very good at talking. People are so funny and have such brilliant stories, and it’s a way to disguise what you’re actually feeling. The reason, I think, is because this is a place where very terrible things have happened and the way we deal with them is by not addressing them. So I feel like the ghosts are alive and they’re active. The past is affecting what you’re doing in a very real way. And if you don’t address the issues, then the darkness just grows, and the damage gets passed down from one generation to the next, like in the book. – from the Guardian interview

On Sunday February 18, [1945] the lieutenant in charge of Navy press at the
Oakland air base agreed to see her. Eying her credentials once more, he

On Sunday February 18, [1945] the lieutenant in charge of Navy press at the
Oakland air base agreed to see her. Eying her credentials once more, he handed them back.
“And just where was it you wanted to go,” he asked.
She had been rehearsing her response ever since her credentials first arrived in the mail.
“As far forward as you’ll let me,” she replied.
“Be here at 0600, tomorrow,” he said.

…good intentions have rarely paved such a direct route to hell.

She slept in Bedouin tents in the Algerian desert, and in the foxholes she dug herself in the hills overlooking Beirut. She rode in picket boats between battleships off the coast of Iwo Jima and flew in a nuclear-armed jet stationed on an aircraft carrier in the Aegean sea. On New Year’s Eve 1958, she patrolled the Soviet border with the Turkish infantry. On New Year’s Day 1959, she photographed Fidel Castro’s army as they entered Havana. She jumped out of planes over America, the Dominican Republic, South Korea, Laos, and Vietnam. She heard bullets flying over her head in Asia, North America, Europe, and Africa, and knew that they all sounded the same.

I side with prisoners against guards, enlisted men against officers, weakness against power.
—Dickey Chapelle

Lorissa Rinehart writes about art, war, and their points of intersection.
Her writing has recently appeared in Hyperallergic, Perfect Strangers, and Narratively, among other publications…When not writing she can be found photographing the natural world impinging upon the urban landscape or digging in the dirt with her husband and two sons in Santa Barbara, California. She holds an MA from NYU in Experimental Humanities and a BA in Literature from UC Santa Cruz.

The arc of every human life is measured out by the ceaseless accumulation of knowledge. Requiring only awareness and yet always welcoming curiosity

The arc of every human life is measured out by the ceaseless accumulation of knowledge. Requiring only awareness and yet always welcoming curiosity, the transmission of knowledge into the sentient mind is an uninterruptible process of ebbings and flowings. There are times—in infancy, or when at school in youth—during which the rate at which knowledge is gathered becomes intense and urgent, a welling tsunami of information ever ready for the mind to process. At other times, maybe later in life, the inbound knowledge drifts in more slowly, set to adhere and thicken like moss, or a patina.

Digital amnesia, for example, is now widely agreed to be a phenomenon, a thing. It is a condition that posits that words looked up online are often forgotten almost as quickly as they are acquired. Information that we know can easily be Googled needs never be known, or if it is known, needs never to be retained. Telephone numbers, for example, once so often known and the more cherished ones remembered, need not even be known at all now. The name of the person to be called is all that is required. The name is hyperlinked to the phone’s dialing system and merely touching the name gets the distant phone to ring.

A Chinese school final exam is to the American SAT as Go is to Go Fish.

…knowledge has long been seen as far too precious to treat with casual disregard. It needs to not just be kept, but kept safe and secure. For almost as long as language, especially written language, has existed, we have sought ways of collecting, storing, and safeguarding this endlessly swelling body of what is known, of what has been learned, and of all that can then be taught, discussed, challenged, debated, and decided. The most widely recognized and most ancient means of storage is the institution that derives its English name from the Latin word for the inner bark of a tree, on which early works were said to have been written. The Latin word for this bark is liber; by way of centuries of etymological convolution, the English word, used since Chaucer’s time, is, of course, the library.

Why…did the transmission of knowledges that seem so potentially beneficial to us all get to be so drowned out by the noise of commerce and nationalism and war?

What can and may and will happen next to our mental development if and when we have no further need to know, perhaps no need to think? What if we are then unable to gain true knowledge, enlightenment, or insight—that most precious of human commodities, true wisdom? What then will become of us?

How, in sum, do we value the knowledge that, thanks to the magic of electronics, is now cast before us in so vast and ceaseless and unstoppable a cascade? Amid the torrent and its fury, what is to become of thought—care and calm and quiet thoughtfulness? What of our own chance of ever gaining wisdom? Do we need it? Does anybody? How does a world function if no one within it is wise?

…it’s hard to remember sometimes that no one is only who they appear to be at the moment. It’s hard to remember sometimes all that goes into a life

…it’s hard to remember sometimes that no one is only who they appear to be at the moment. It’s hard to remember sometimes all that goes into a life, all the different versions of a person, throughout the years, all the ways in which people are capable of changing.

…sometimes he is utterly exhausted by being an adult, by being someone, expected to explain the world to younger people, as if he’s in possession of the right answers.

I was very interested in showing people who are all different from one another, so I sat down and brainstormed a bunch of different people, who might be working at the mall or go to the mall. I wanted these people to be those whose lives would not otherwise intersect with one another. I also thought about conflict and tension; I have these characters who are extremely set in their ways and believe one thing so strongly. When you put them in scenes with each other, you can see what might happen. It’s also about questioning: are they going to stay static, or is there room for growth? If there is room, how much would feel realistic? With the multiple narrators, I enjoyed being able to get into each of their perspectives. A character might seem a certain way and be really frustrating in one chapter, when viewed through someone else’s thought process. In a later chapter, you might get their own thought process—they might still be frustrating, but you could at least understand why they believe the things that they believe. - from the Electric Lit interview

I wanted there to be ten chapters in the span of ten months, leading up to the mall’s closing. While writing these stories, I was thinking a lot about Olive Kitteridge and Olive Again, by Elizabeth Strout, and how those circled around a particular place, which was a small town in Maine.

“People who often get the most attention are the loudest, but people who are the quietest often have a lot going on inside. I wanted to explore that in this book. Many of the characters I write about are isolated and lonely. Many are not living the lives they had once wished for. As a writer I can explore the interiors of these people. I can go into their minds and show what they’re thinking and how they’re feeling.” - from the Times-Union interview

I had my first sabbatical during the 2018-19 school year, and that’s when I wrote the first draft of my novel. I tricked myself by saying, ‘It’s not a novel. It’s a series of linked stories.’ - from the Times Union interview

I can’t take credit for it; my agent came up with it. My original title was Those Days at the Mall, which is a character’s line in the very last chapter. Obviously, the mall map says “You Are Here.” But it’s also so much about place and where people spend their time. So, the question behind the title was thinking about where we spend our days. -from the Electric Lit interview

She stares at her son, willing him to look at her and tell her about the magic tricks he’s been practicing. She wants him to invite her to his school talent show. She wants him to tell her about the videos he’s been watching. But he just keeps reading. Tina looks down at the desk, sees her sketch of the goose, peeking out from under some menus. Jackson shuffled around, and she grabs the sketch, balls it up, and drops it into the garbage can finish the desk. As the crumpled paper falls from her hand, she thinks it’s not just that Jackson is hiding something from her; it’s that he is imitating her. He’s keeping secret something that’s important to him, maybe because he’s afraid he’s no good or it’s silly or she’d be disappointed to know he cares about such a thing. She feels certain he has learned to be quiet and secretive, and to not allow himself to talk about impractical dreams from her.

Karin Lin-Greenberg is an American fiction writer. Her story collection, Faulty Predictions (University of Georgia Press, 2014), won the 2013 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction[1] and the 2014 Foreword Review INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award (Gold Winner for Short Stories).[2] Her stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review Online, New Ohio Review, The North American Review, and Redivider. She is currently an associate professor of English at Siena College in Loudonville, New York. She has previously taught at Missouri State University, The College of Wooster, and Appalachian State University. She earned an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Pittsburghin 2006, an MA in Literature and Writing from Temple University in 2003, and a BA in English from Bryn Mawr College.

The sea whispers, faint. It sounds like pages shuffling. A seal barks. I lick a finger and test the breeze. The wind is in the east. A moment late

The sea whispers, faint. It sounds like pages shuffling. A seal barks. I lick a finger and test the breeze. The wind is in the east. A moment later it comes, mournful and high. The stones are singing and I feel it, at last, that I’m home. I listen for a time, despite my tiredness. I think, if heartbreak had a sound, it would be just like this.

She can smell him the way wild animals smell prey.

The visions don’t frighten me anymore. I can usually tell what’s real and what isn’t.

The leaves of the sugar maple whisper—under it, there’s a high-pitched whine, a long shrill note like bad singing…it sounds like all the things you’re not supposed to believe in—mermaids, selkies, sirens…’What’s that sound?’ It seems like it’s coming from inside of me, somehow. Dad pauses in the act of unlocking the door. ‘It’s the stones on the beach. High tide has eaten away at them, making little holes—kind of like finger stops on a flute—and when the wind is in the east, coming over the ocean, it whistles through.’

Sometimes her mother talks to Pearl in the night. She learns to keep herself awake, so she can hear her. It always happens the same way. Rebecca’s coming. It starts with the sound of the wind roaring in Pearl’s head, just like that day on the mountain. And then Rebecca’s warm hands close over her cold ears.

I suffer from hypnagogic hallucinations. They started when I was about 13, taking the form of a hand in the small of my back as I was falling asleep, shoving me out of bed really hard. I knew there was someone in the room and I knew they didn’t mean me well. With the information I had at the time – pre-Google as well – there was no other explanation for it, was there? I think it’s probably the deepest chasm I have ever looked into. There’s nothing comparable to it in the daylight world. - from the 9/26/22 Guardian interview

Writers are monsters, really. We eat everything we see.

The book is a mirror and I am stepping through the looking glass.

‘Writing is power,’ she says. ‘Big magic. It’s a way of keeping someone alive forever.’

I think about our three names, us kids, as we were. ‘Wilder,’ I whisper to myself sometimes. ‘Nathaniel, Harper.’ We’re all named after writers. It’s too much of a coincidence. Harper. Wilder. Harlow. The names chime together. The kind of thing that would never happen in real life but it might happen in a book.

‘You wanted to live forever,’ Harper says gently. ‘You both did, you and Wilder. That’s all writers really want, whatever they say.

I wake to the sound of breath. No hand caressing me, this time. Instead I have the sense that I am being pummeled and stretched, pulled by firm hands into agonizing, geometrical shapes. I scream but no voice comes from my throat. Instead, an infernal scratching—horrible, like rats’ claws on stone, like bone grinding, like the creak of a bough before it breaks. Or like a pen scratching on paper.

Come. I want to show you something. I learned it from the missionary. We haven’t seen him in a while, yes?…I retrieve my teacup where there is a li

Come. I want to show you something. I learned it from the missionary. We haven’t seen him in a while, yes?…I retrieve my teacup where there is a little honey left, and I walk toward the perimeter of the woods and hold it up. I hear her coming up behind me, the slow rustle of her skirt in the grass, but I don’t turn.
A few minutes later, a bee appears, hovering, circling, then dips into the cup. Then it flies away into the woods. I follow it. She follows me. When I can’t see it anymore or hear it anymore, I stand still and hold up the cup and wait for the bee to come back. Which it does. So we move on, and as we head farther into the woods, I tell the daughter that it is a trick I learned from the missionary. We’re creating a trail.
“To the hive,” I say. “And the honey.”

I can’t speak to a unifying Korean identity, but I think, growing up, because I had very little access to an extended family, I was often searching for my own version of that. And I think all my characters are searching for their own version of family. They’re quite literally and figuratively orphans. And they want to rebuild. They want to find a home in all sense of that word. - from the Pen-Ten Interview

My grandfather was a Korean War refugee who eventually, after the war, settled in a house in the mountains in South Korea. Where he lived wasn’t nearly as isolated as the setting of “Valley of the Moon,” but my memory of him was that he was—or had become after the war—a bit of a loner, someone who kept to himself, and so I think (a) the character of Tongsu and where he returns to was always linked from the start, and (b) that initial push forward into this story stemmed from wanting to create and capture, perhaps, some corner of family history that felt, and still feels, really distant to me—to engage with that distance, creatively, and to engage with him and with so many others of that generation who had to flee their homes and do anything they could to survive during those horrific years. - from the New Yorker interview

Bo thought he would eventually miss Queens or perhaps even South Korea, where he had spent the first eighteen years of his life, but as the months went on, they were like the faces he tried to recall: far away, as though the places he’d once lived had been homes to someone else.

Every night, the moon rose from here, and fell, and shattered. And then built itself back up again.

economic reasons.”During the pandemic, Yoon says, “we were all scattered. I was separated from friends and to cope I imagined a kind of map. We were all in different places, but we were all part of one world. That got me thinking about the family tree, thinking of that as a map as well. This was the seed of the collection: the movement of a country and its people.” - from the Louisa Ermelino PW interview

Paul Yoon (born 1980) is an American fiction writer. In 2010 The National Book Foundation named him a 5 Under 35 honoree.

Early life and education
Yoon's grandfather was a North Korean refugee who resettled in South Korea, where he later founded an orphanage. Yoon graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1998 and Wesleyan University in 2002.

Career
His first book, Once the Shore, was selected as a New York Times Notable Book; a Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Publishers Weekly, and Minneapolis Star Tribune Best Book of the Year; and a National Public Radio Best Debut of the Year. His work has appeared in the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories collection, and he is the recipient of a 5 under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation. His novel, Snow Hunters, won the 2014 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. His 2023 story collection, The Hive and the Honey, was named a finalist for The Story Prize.
Recently a part of the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars, Yoon is now a Briggs-Copeland lecturer at Harvard University.

The dead could do nothing worse to him than the living had already done.

He couldn’t shake the inkling tha

The dead could do nothing worse to him than the living had already done.

He couldn’t shake the inkling that something was about to happen, even as the morning passed undisturbed.

The spring his family moved here from Foscoe, Blackburn’s father sent him to catch trout for supper. He’d been fishing on the edge of the Hampton property when Jacob appeared. Blackburn thought he’d come to run him off. Instead, Jacob guided him to the pasture’s best pools tent, and soon Blackburn’s stringer was heavy with fish. He showed Blackburn a pretend fort made of fallen branches, said that together they could build it up even bigger. It was only when Blackburn was about to head home that Jacob acknowledged his face. Does it hurt? Blackburn said no. I’m glad it doesn’t, Jacob had said.

When Rash was in high school, his father was hospitalized for depression, an illness that tormented him for years. Sue Rash was left alone to look after three children in a small Southern town, one that often felt to her eldest son like its own dwarf planet. But when the family needed support from their neighbors, they got it. “The whole town helped us,” Ron says. “It was a struggle that was never spoken of, but they knew. And people came through for us.” - from the Garden & Gun interview

Somethin's comin', I don't know what it is
But it is gonna be great

Ron Rash’s family has lived in the southern Appalachian Mountains since the mid-1700’s, and it is this region that is the primary focus of his writing. Rash grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, and graduated from Gardner-Webb College and Clemson University. He holds the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University. Rash is the author of 9 books: The Night The New Jesus Fell to Earth (short stories), Casualties (short stories), Eureka Mill (poetry), and Among the Believers (poetry), Raising the Dead (poetry), One Foot in Eden (novel), Saints at the River (novel), The World Made Straight (2006), and Serena (2008). His poetry and fiction have appeared in over one hundred journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The Longman Anthology of Southern Literature, Western Wind, Sewanee Review, Yale Review, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Southern Review, Shenandoah and Poetry.

“Evil is everywhere. Where you least expect it. It can seep out of the radio. Or a lobster salad.”
“Oh, Issy—why do you say that?”
“Because it talk

“Evil is everywhere. Where you least expect it. It can seep out of the radio. Or a lobster salad.”
“Oh, Issy—why do you say that?”
“Because it talks to me.”
“What talks to you?”
“Evil.”
“Iris talks to you, and evil talks to you?”
“Yes.”
“Are they the same?”

Part of me wanted to shut her up—if there’s one thing I couldn’t stand, it was a rich girl who felt unlucky in life. But another part knew that what she was saying was factually true. Her family was a train wreck, almost as bad as my mine except rich. Meanwhile, a third part of me couldn’t help noticing her long lashes and her lips—she had what they call a rosebud mouth, a perfect version of it. “I may have misjudged you, miss. If I did, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t soften on me,” she said.
“If it was a hundred in the shade, I wouldn’t soften on you, miss.”
“Good. Because I’m bad, Detective. I do terrible things. And if you soften on me, I’ll do them to you.”

Bigotry was shameless and rampant, with Mexicans forcibly “repatriated” by the hundreds of thousands, the Chinese Exclusion Act still in place, and hostile derision openly directed at “Okies,” a term then referring to poor white migrants from the Dust Bowl. In the 1940s came the Japanese internment, when full-fledged American citizens were literally caged off. For the first time, Blacks came to the Bay Area in significant numbers, pouring in from the American South in search of jobs, only to find themselves subjected to vicious prejudice, excluded by labor unions, denied entry into restaurants, theaters and hotels, and barred from living in white neighborhoods. Throughout this period, numerous other ethnic groups—such as Italians, Greeks, Poles, Slavs, Hungarians, and Jews—occupied a subordinate position too, not yet considered fully white. - from the Author’s Note

I chose to make Detective Sullivan a light-skinned mixed-race man in part because Berkeley’s police force in the 1940s included almost no women or minorities, but also because I wanted to explore the phenomenon of racial “passing.” Sullivan is part Mexican, part Nebraskan, and part Jewish on his Mexican side…But Sullivan can pass as white and chooses to go by Al Sullivan rather than Alejo Gutiérrez for reasons he has not fully admitted to himself. - from the Author’s Note

I hate to say it of a fellow Berkeley officer, but Dicky O’Gar was so thick he couldn’t tell which way an elevator was going if you gave him two guesses.

I put my collar up, pulled my hat brim down, and set off through the drizzle, wondering how much I’d been played in the last seventy-two hours and by how many different women.

Amy Lynn Chua (born October 26, 1962), also known as "the Tiger Mom", is an American corporate lawyer, legal scholar, and writer. She is the John M. Duff Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School with an expertise in international business transactions, law and development, ethnic conflict, and globalization.[5] She joined the Yale faculty in 2001 after teaching at Duke Law School for seven years. Prior to teaching, she was a corporate law associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. Chua is also known for her parenting memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. In 2011, she was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people, one of The Atlantic's Brave Thinkers, and one of Foreign Policy's Global Thinkers.

We used to joke that of the three of us, I could kill you up close, Tinbu could kill you from another ship, and Dalila could kill you from a differ

We used to joke that of the three of us, I could kill you up close, Tinbu could kill you from another ship, and Dalila could kill you from a different city three days later.

I’d grown up feeling terribly unusual; out of place and never at peace with the fate afforded young girls. In a hidden corner of my heart, I nursed embarrassing dreams. That I was not the child of my parents, but the daughter of a tribe of female warriors who flew upon winged horses. Or I was heir to a hidden sea kingdom below the waves, and the whispered sighs I heard from the water when we sailed and the strange lightning in the distance were not natural weather phenomena but magic, my true family calling to me. Then I grew into an adult. One who learned the hard way that if there was magic in this world, it could be as brutal and cunning as the worst monsters out of a fairy tale.

Easily one of the most enjoyable topics to research was criminal activity—specifically overwrought stories and urban legends about criminal activity—in the medieval world. All the cons, tricks, and poisons in this book are pulled from history: there’s actually a thirteenth century charlatan’s guide (recently translated into English by the Library of Arabic Literature) which discusses both the three cups game still used to swindle gullible tourists today and the numerous knock-out drugs Dalila employs. The guild Dalila hails from—the Banu Sasan—was also real, or as “real” as the fantastical odes recited about it were. - From the Fantasy Hive interview

Let’s talk about the night I accidentally married a demon.

So many of the characters in this book are coming to terms with past misdeeds or trying stick to a more righteous path and then you have this utterly selfish, sexy creature of chaos and trickery just waltz in and repeatedly betray them to save his own skin and spin “a better story.” And that’s the very point of him—he’s not human, he’s very much meant to be a relic of a forgotten age when people did tell stories of meddling, petty gods and monsters, a supernatural aspect that naturally feeds on human ambition and wouldn’t even understand why he’s expected to feel remorse for doing so. It was fun to create such a foil for Amina herself and really delve into the almost alien psyche of such a being. - from The Fantasy Hive interview

The largest pearl in the world; a miniature moon said to have been snatched from the sky by a lovelorn fairy and gifted to Queen Bilqis, who made it the centerpiece of her crown. A gem believed to bestow upon its owner countless wishes, supernatural sight, and unending good fortune.

I straightened up with care, pinching my brow to keep black spots from dancing before my eyes.

“What about you, Lady Dalila?” Noor asked. “Is there anyone back home you are eager to return to?”
Dalila picked at her teeth. “I had to abandon a time sensitive experiment with extremely promising indications as a knock-out gas.”
“For pain relief,” I amended quickly. “Dalila is our…healer.”
Noor’s brows rose slightly. “Ah, yes. Majed speaks frequently of how you ‘healed’ him when you first met.”
Dalila rolled her eyes. “It was hardly the worst of my poisons. There are some physicians who actually believe it beneficial to vomit blood every now and then. It balances the humors.”

When I started working on Amina, the goal I had for myself, and I think I wrote this in the author’s note at the end, was that I wanted to make it completely historically accurate—outside of the plot. I did a ton of research. There’s been an incredible amount of new work done on the medieval Indian Ocean, but you’re still looking at 12th-century texts. It’s almost 1,000 years ago, and there is a great limit to what we know. - from The Portalist interview

“Oh, those weren’t humans. Those were daevas.”
“What in God’s name is a daeva?”
He held up a hand. “You don’t want to know, trust me. More overdramatic creatures have never existed. And they’re not even the worst ones here. Everyone likes to complain about humans, but let me tell you…spend a couple centuries with the inhabitants of the unseen realms, and you’ll be aching to haunt a mortal latrine.”

I wanted to travel the world and sail every sea. I wanted to have adventures, to be a hero, to have my tales told in courtyards and street fairs where perhaps kids who’d grown up like me, with more imagination than means might be inspired to dream. Where women who were told there was only one sort of respectful life for them could listen to tales of another who’d broken away—and thrived when she’d done so.

Perseus…has no interest in the well being of any creature if it impedes his desire to do whatever he wants. He is a vicious little thug and the soo

Perseus…has no interest in the well being of any creature if it impedes his desire to do whatever he wants. He is a vicious little thug and the sooner you grasp that, and stop thinking of him as a brave boy hero, the closer you’ll be to understanding what actually happened.

Who decides what is a monster?

‘If you get trodden on by a giant or a god – which wouldn’t be intentional on our part, incidentally – but in the heat of battle one of us might step in the wrong place and there you’d be. . . . Well, would have been. Anyway, it would be painless. Probably very painful just before it was painless, but not for long.’… ‘Come on. If you do die, I’ll put in a word for you to get a constellation. Promise.’

He’s just a bag of meat wandering round, irritating people.’

…all the great tragedies are stories ultimately of betrayal. They’re stories where people betrayed the people closest to them but they're also stories

…all the great tragedies are stories ultimately of betrayal. They’re stories where people betrayed the people closest to them but they're also stories where people betray themselves. They kind of betrayed the better person that they could have become. – B&N interview

Third Apparition –
Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsiname hill
Shall come against him.

Macbeth –
That will never be.
Who can impress the forest, bid the tree
Unfix his earth-bound root? - The Scottish
Play

…the yellow circle labelled ‘Mira’ pulled out into the street and began traversing slowly north. Shelley Noakes reduced the scale of the map until her own circle, a gently pulsing blue, appeared at the edge of the screen, and watched the yellow disc advance imperceptibly upon the blue for almost thirty seconds before turning off the phone and throwing it, suddenly and childishly, into the pile of laundry at the end of her bed.

Shelley wanted out. Out of the group; out of the suffocating moral censure, the pretended fellow feeling, the constant obligatory thrift; out of financial peril; out of the flat; out of her relationship with Mira, which was not romantic in any physical sense, but which had somehow come to feel both exclusive and proprietary; and above all, out of her role as the sensible, dependable, predictable sidekick, never quite as rebellious as Mira, never quite as free-thinking, never – even when they acted together – quite as brave.

[Catton] drew up another intricate masterplan in which each of the main characters could be seen as Macbeth, with a corresponding Lady Macbeth, witches and so on. It sounds tricksier than it is: as the narrative perspective shifts, everybody could be the villain. She wanted to stop readers playing “the polarised blame game we are all used to in contemporary politics,” she explains. “You wouldn’t be able to say: ‘These are my people so they are obviously the good guys. These are the people that I despise so they are obviously the bad guys.’” - from The Guardian interview

It’s something I have thought about a lot…how my generational placement or position has conditioned me. The book is designed generationally. There are three generations represented in terms of the points of view. And I wanted to really explore the generational differences in terms of how they deal with certain contemporary problems that we’re all kind of facing globally. - from The Toronto Public Library interview

“Millennials are quite willing to cosy up to the tech gen Xers,” she says. “We are all personally enriching billionaires like Elon Musk by freely giving away our data…These minerals are in the phones that are around us all the time. I want my iPhone. I want to be able to have the freedoms that it brings. We are all complicit.” - from The Guardian interview

Macbeth is a play that's all about prophecy. It's animated by prophecy. So I …re-read it with everything that was happening in terms of world events resounding in my head and suddenly saw it in a really different way, as a play that contains very interesting and loud warnings about what happens when you regard the future with too much certainty if you're too convinced about what lies just down the road. Because of course Macbeth makes the ending of Macbeth happen. None of that was written on the wall before before he received those prophecies and I and so I kind of wanted to achieve a similar effect in a novel by writing a book about incremental political actions and moral actions that end up kind of having these enormous effects that were avoidable. - from the Barnes & Noble interview

Like all self-mythologising rebels, Mira preferred enemies to rivals, and often turned her rivals into enemies, the better to disdain them as secret agents of the status quo.

Eleanor Catton MNZM (born 1985) is a New Zealand novelist and screenwriter. Born in Canada, Catton moved to New Zealand as a child and grew up in Christchurch. She completed a master's degree in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her award-winning debut novel, The Rehearsal, written as her Master's thesis, was published in 2008, and has been adapted into a 2016 film of the same name. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Booker Prize, making Catton the youngest author ever to win the prize (at age 28) and only the second New Zealander. It was subsequently adapted into a television miniseries, with Catton as screenwriter. In 2023, she was named on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list.

…her next work, “a queasy immersion thriller” that will be called Doubtful Sound, after the remote fjord in the south-west of New Zealand where it is set. She has had the title for a long time – “I just think it is so beautiful” – but it was only in the final months of completing Birnam Wood that the story came to her. - from The Guardian interview