The January issue of Asymptote is out, featuring an excellent interview with Year in Reading alumnus Junot Díaz about language acquisition and diasporic identity. As he puts it, “I live a life where both English and Spanish are in italics in my brain. It costs me no extra effort; it doesn’t feel unusual; it doesn’t feel like an infirmity, but it does strike me every now and then that there are people who don’t pick over their language the way I do, who aren’t so self-conscious of what they’re saying, who have a natural tongue.” Pair with Thea Lim’s Millions essay on race and gender in Díaz’s books.
English Hangs Over Me
Good Gugge-mugga!
Congratulations to the new group of Guggenheim Fellows in fiction and nonfiction, which, in addition to such luminaries as Kiran Desai and Colson Whitehead, includes past Millions contributors J.C. Hallman, Terese Svoboda, and Ben Marcus.
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Lupita Nyong’o + Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie + ‘Americanah’
In book-to-film news, Lupita Nyong’o has signed on to produce and star in an adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie‘s novel Americanah, and we couldn’t be more excited. For more from Adichie, be sure to check out her “Year in Reading” piece for The Millions.
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Voices in Asian-Anglophone Fiction
This week in the New Yorker Jane Hu analyzes the “dispassionate first-person narrators” prominent in works by English-speaking Asian authors and questions whether that makes it easier to identify with the narrator. She uses Chemistry by NBA 5 under 35 honoree Weike Wang as an example along with other recent works. “Against this tradition, there is, perhaps, another emerging, of Asian-Anglophone writers who both play with and thus begin to undo these tropes of Asian impersonality. The novels by Ishiguro, Park, Lin, and Wang all feature first-person narrators who keep their distance—actively denying readers direct interior access. This is true, it’s important to note, even when the characters they write are not themselves Asian.”
A Community Library of Rare Black Books, Courtesy of Solange
Solange opens the Saint Heron Community Library, a media center dedicated to out-of-print and rare books by Black and Brown voices in poetry, visual art, critical thought, and design.
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Danticat’s Definition
Edwidge Danticat gives us one of the best definitions of the short story in an interview with Kima Jones at The Rumpus. “The short story is like an exquisite painting and you might, when looking at this painting, be wondering what came before or after, but you are fully absorbed in what you’re seeing.” They also discuss Danticat’s novel Claire of the Sea Light, Haitian and Dominican relations, and giving yourself permission to tell the truth. To find out what Danticat has been reading, see her 2013 Year in Reading.
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