For Powells, Chang-rae Lee discusses his picaresque novel, My Year Abroad, with Rhianna Walton, and how he finds himself drawn to characters that are outside of the mainstream. “It’s so hard, especially with characters like Pong,” he says. “He’s not a mainstream character that people know about. This has always been my frustration and challenge. Actually, it’s shaped me as a writer, to try to give enough context for things I just assume people will not understand, or appreciate fully, without me giving extra context. But every book I write is, I think, in some ways an immigrant novel, because it’s always about being in places and situations where you find yourself unsettled or unmoored. At the most basic level, My Year Abroad is that.”
Chang-rae Lee on Writing and Re-writing the Immigrant Novel
Melodious Sound Patterings
“Reaching the end of a Babstock poem, I often felt (and still often feel) stunned into a kind of numinous awe.” Stewart Cole for Partisan on Ken Babstock and the state of Canadian poetry. Continue with confidence on your quest through the Canadian canon with the help of this guide by our very own Michael Bourne.
Smith Wins Bailey’s
Ali Smith‘s How to Be Both has won the Bailey’s Prize for women’s fiction, placing her in the same ranks as Zadie Smith and Lionel Shriver. If you’re not too familiar with Smith’s work, Jonathan Russell Clark wrote about her for The Millions last year.
Writing While Pretty
“I very quickly realized that if you want to seem as a serious writer, you can’t possibly look like a person who looks in the mirror.” Author, Boots spokesperson, Year-in-Reading alum, and all-around badass Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks to The New York Times about beauty, feminism, and writing.
New Hughes
A previously unpublished short story by Langston Hughes is now available online at The New Yorker. Pair with our own Emily Colette Wilkinson’s staff pick, Tambourines to Glory.