In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.
In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.
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Clint Smith, whose spellbinding debut nonfiction book is a must-read, shares his thoughts on reckoning with Confederate landmarks and locations where Black people were enslaved.

In the monumental audiobook of Four Hundred Souls (14 hours), edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, essays and poems chronicling 400 years of Black American history are read by a vast chorus of 87 narrators. Editors Kendi and Blain discuss the transformation of their groundbreaking book into audio, and they’re joined by Penguin Random House Audio producers Sarah Jaffe, Amber Beard and Molly Lo Re, who offer a peek into the production process.

How early in your conception of the book did you begin to plan for the specific challenges and opportunities of the audiobook?
Ibram X. Kendi:
The plans for the audiobook came much later in the process, after the book was finished. We really wanted to actualize what I wrote about in the introduction, that this community of writers was like a choir.

Keisha N. Blain: Like Ibram, I thought the diversity of thought in the book would be best represented with a large cast of narrators. Using a full cast really captures the different voices at play in collecting the experiences of 90 contributors.

“There are few powers more important than the power to tell your own story.”

What’s one benefit of listening to the audiobook of Four Hundred Souls that you don’t get from reading the print book?
Blain: The contributors we gathered for Four Hundred Souls are all outstanding writers. And while that talent is apparent on the page, hearing those same passages read out loud and performed is a revelatory and moving experience.

Considering how much language has been used to control Black lives for hundreds of years, how does a choral audiobook like this one reclaim Black power?
Kendi: There are few powers more important than the power to tell your own story. Black people have been fighting for this power for centuries, and we claimed this power for Four Hundred Souls.

Blain: The attempts to silence Black people—and especially Black women—are a defining feature of American history. The audiobook of Four Hundred Souls aims a direct challenge to those efforts by giving voice to a communal history written and narrated by Black people.


ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of the Four Hundred Souls audiobook.


Some of the book’s essays are read by their authors, others by actors. Tell us about the process of matching essays with narrators.
Sarah Jaffe, Executive Producer:
We wanted to assemble a cast that felt true to the project of the book, and to do that we knew we needed a plurality and a diversity of narrators. A combination of authors and actors, with a few celebrities among them, felt like the best way to do that, blending familiar and famous voices with fresher ones, and even some who had never done this before, juxtaposing different vocal textures.

Four Hundred SoulsWe identified a few authors who would be particularly good fits to read their own work: those renowned for their work in the audio world; poets who are skilled performers; an array of legendary activists and public speakers; and professors who perform at the front of a classroom every day and know how to make their words sink in and sing in a different way.

When it came time to pair actors with the rest of the pieces, we wanted to be really thoughtful about how we did that. I’m a firm believer that while actors can do anything, everyone (actor or not) does their best work when they’re working on something they’re passionate about. And since this book is largely about how Black America is not a monolith, we wanted to give our cast the chance to choose the pieces that resonated most with them. So instead of just assigning pieces, we gave actors the option to choose what they wanted to read.

Amber Beard, Associate Producer: If they felt a personal connection to a particular essay or story, then that would only make the reading that more poignant.

Molly Lo Re, Associate Producer: It meant a lot of puzzle-piecing behind the scenes, but I think you can tell with each narrator that they have a strong connection to the subject matter. That extra investment is key in making this audiobook really special.

“I’m a firm believer that while actors can do anything, everyone (actor or not) does their best work when they’re working on something they’re passionate about.”

Was there any essay or piece that was particularly difficult to pair with a narrator, or perhaps one that stuck out in your mind as especially important to get right?
Jaffe: They were all important to get right! Honestly, one of the best parts about handling casting the way we did is that it allowed us to learn a lot more about the actors we worked with. We paired actors with pieces that they chose because they were about their hometowns or mirrored their personal histories, or were by or about people they had a connection to, or as at least one actor told me, spoke to their souls. I’m so grateful. The more I know about each actor and what interests them, the more it helps me to be a better producer and pair them with future projects that I know they’ll be excited about.

Beard: I’m a longtime admirer of Phylicia Rashad’s work, so I can’t help but get excited to hear her eloquent voice. In general, we wanted to try to stay true to each piece’s point of view, so we did try to pair each with a narrator who reflected an aspect of what was being written about. But as this is a shared community experience, we didn’t make that a hard and fast rule.

Lo Re: What I personally love about the finished product is that the performances are simultaneously intertwined yet separate strands. The audiobook is undoubtedly a collective endeavor, with voices coming together to share 400 years of the African American experience. But at the same time, each essay is given voice by a different reader with their own perspective, performance style, vocal tone. For me, it was less about getting individual pairings “right” and more about making sure we got the overall experience of listening to the book right. This meant casting as wide a net as possible when looking for readers.


ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover more of the year’s best full-cast audiobooks.


Are there any other audiobooks with a big cast that you drew inspiration from for this production?
Jaffe: George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo has a famously large cast and is one of the most ambitious audiobooks I’ve ever listened to, and that’s probably the book that came up most often in thinking about how to approach Four Hundred Souls. I don’t think it’s an accident that both books are about a reckoning with American history, the unreliability of conventional historical narratives and the ways in which both remarkable and everyday people make and are enmeshed in history. Both books try to make the human details that shape a nation’s character visible, and both make it clear that in order to truly reckon with our past and present, we need to hear a plurality of voices telling their stories. Dr. Kendi and Dr. Blain’s idea for a community history is genius and groundbreaking in this way.

Beard: This was my first time casting an audiobook with a cast this large. I think it was a great opportunity to work with narrators that we’ve always wanted to and also discover new ones that we’ll definitely want to continue to work with in the future.

Lo Re: Honestly, because of the added complications of the coronavirus, this one felt like a completely different beast. We recorded in December 2020 and January 2021, under the looming shadow of rising COVID-19 cases. The vast majority of people read from home studio setups, and we approached every aspect of the production with the question, How can we do this in the safest way possible?


Books for Black History Month 2021

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Six books to deepen your knowledge of our country’s past, including Four Hundred Souls.


Is there any particular performance from this collection that stuck with you after you heard it?
Kendi:
I loved Danai Gurira’s performance [of Martha S. Jones’ “1774–1779 The American Revolution”], and Professor Blain’s closing oration was powerful.

Blain: I loved Phylicia Rashad’s performance of Bernice McFadden’s essay on Zora Neale Hurston.

Jaffe: All of the poetry gave me goosebumps, especially J.D. Jackson reading Jericho Brown’s “Upon Arrival,” and Patricia Smith reading her poem “Coiled and Unleashed.” But the choral transitions between pieces might be my favorite part of this production. We wanted to underscore the community nature of this book, and so throughout the program, our editor mixed a variety of voices announcing the title of each piece and each five-year range. As you’re listening, it really does feel like a cohesive history told to you by a community, with each member taking their turn to speak.

Beard: I am a longtime poetry nerd, so I’m always thrilled to get a chance to bring poems to life via audio. I was particularly drawn to Mahogany L. Browne’s poem, “Morse: John Wayne Niles . __. . Ermias Joseph Asghedom.” The opening lines, “Gunshot wound / is a violent way to say gone missing,” are so potent and resonant with what happens in our world today. Also the use of Morse code added a unique element.

Lo Re: One thing that we did with this audiobook that I’d like to bring to other audiobooks is having everyone say their own name for the credits. I absolutely loved the way it gave contributors a tad more ownership over the final product, like a curtain-call moment.

“It becomes intimate and multifaceted and overtly personal in a way history often isn’t. That’s powerful. This is a powerful book.”

Is there anything that surprised you once you heard the final audiobook?
Kendi: I framed the 90 contributors to Four Hundred Souls as a choir in the introduction, but hearing the choir through the audiobook surprised me, pleasantly.

Blain: Hearing the different performances amazed me. I knew Four Hundred Souls was an ambitious project, and co-editing it further revealed how unique it was to have so many contributors across so many fields and genres. However, the audiobook revealed how truly impressive the book is—and I am proud to be a part of this wonderful project.

Jaffe: We always say this about audiobooks, but it really does bring the text to life—maybe more so in this book than almost any other I’ve listened to. You hear these layers of history and experience speaking to you in chorus, filtered through this powerful writing and these beautiful performances, and occasionally as you’re immersed in what you’re listening to, you recognize a voice, which gives you that feeling of, “Hey, I know this person!” Maybe they’re telling you something you never knew before or never thought about that way before, or just something you really needed to hear someone say out loud and name as true. It becomes intimate and multifaceted and overtly personal in a way history often isn’t. That’s powerful. This is a powerful book.

Beard: So many of these stories are unknown. To put real, human voices to them helps give them life and power. These are stories that need to be heard and shared. I thought it was such a beautiful thing to have this literal chorus of voices speaking the truth of the African American experience.

Lo Re: The thing that probably most surprised me was how effective the layered voices sounded throughout. While we had planned on incorporating collective lines in the audiobook from very early in the process, I didn’t really know what the final version would sound like. I imagined the lines would be read as one voice—but the way that the final version pulls out individual voices and the voices appear to be coming from different physical spaces is so much richer and completely bowled me over. The brilliant editors at Tim Bader Audio deserve so much credit for how delicately they mixed together these sections.

 

Kendi photo by Stephen Voss. Blain photo by Chioke l’Anson.

Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain are joined by Penguin Random House Audio producers to discuss the monumental cast recording of Four Hundred Souls.
Amanda Montell peels back the linguistic layers of these groups and demonstrates that even mainstream brands and organizations use “cultish language” to draw people in.

James Tate Hill is a man of many talents and multiple jobs: He teaches writing online and at North Carolina A&T State University, pens the audiobooks column for Literary Hub and is the fiction and reviews editor for the literary journal Monkeybicycle. In 2015 he became a novelist with the publication of Academy Gothic. And now he’s a memoirist, too, with his new book, Blind Man’s Bluff.

That’s an impressive list of accomplishments—especially since, for nearly 15 years, Hill had an additional exhausting, around-the-clock job: concealing from everyone around him, through a series of strategic misdirections, lies of omission and daring feats of method acting, that he is legally blind.

Thankfully, that era of his life has come to a close, and in Blind Man’s Bluff, Hill is upbeat and candid as he speaks his truth about the years when he was, as he writes, “always relieved people thought I was an asshole and not blind” when he didn’t respond to inquiring glances or friendly waves.


ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Blind Man’s Bluff.


This is an unusual approach to human relationships, the author acknowledges in a call to the Greensboro, North Carolina, home where he lives with his wife. But Hill’s initial fear of stigma and judgment was so all-consuming that engaging in extraordinary efforts to hide what he saw as a terrible flaw seemed entirely reasonable—so much so that it developed into a full-fledged secret life.

Hill’s dedication to obfuscation began at age 16 when he learned he had Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy, a condition that causes loss of vision over time as the cells in the optic nerve die. From then on, he would feign eye contact during conversations. At restaurants, he would ask the server for recommendations rather than attempting to read a menu. When he began teaching college classes, he’d tell students to speak without raising their hands.

But what made secret-keeping seem like the right response? “It was definitely the social element, when I realized OK, I’m different, and I don’t like the ways I’m different,” Hill says. He longed for a solution to the anger he felt at his diagnosis and the uncertainty that lay ahead, and he viewed “stoicism as a victory, as an answer.” He thought skipping over his grief would be a sort of solution, without “knowing for a very long time that there was anything problematic with that.”

“Your relationships deepen exponentially when you’re no longer hiding parts of yourself.”

Now in his mid-40s, Hill sees his blindness as a feature rather than a bug and credits his writerly career with helping him take big emotional leaps toward self-acceptance. “Academy Gothic was the first time I was writing in any sort of autobiographical physicality, with the main character having the same impairment that I do,” he says. “It’s not an emotional book. It’s sort of a Raymond Chandler-esque satirical academic mystery.” But it was the personal essays Hill wrote as part of the publicity campaign for Academy Gothic that began drawing attention.

In 2016, Hill’s Literary Hub essay “On Being a Writer Who Can’t Read” got a response “so much more intense than anything else I had written or published,” he says. “It was almost as though I had tapped into an even more honest, more compelling voice than the one I had fabricated for the novel . . . and I slowly realized it was very rewarding to tap into that voice.”

In Blind Man’s Bluff, Hill’s voice ranges from moving to funny to self-loathing to contemplative as he reveals his darkest thoughts and most difficult days alongside precious moments of triumph and joy. He periodically employs the second person—“as a way of acknowledging that my own experience is not exclusive to me,” he says—to excellent effect, especially when homing in on the persistent isolation he felt at home, at school and in his own head.

“I acknowledge as blind. I identify as disabled. It may be trite to say this, but: It’s very liberating.”

Hill also includes well-crafted, hair-raising passages about the risks he took to avoid asking for help as his vision worsened, such as crossing a busy street solo. “Each zooming vehicle is your natural predator deciding capriciously not to eat you,” he writes. There’s also the lower-stakes but still exquisitely nerve-fraying “Grand Guignol of canapes, a chip that must be sent on a recon mission into a dip of unknown depth or viscosity.” And there are hilarious and insightful scenes about online dating, as the author navigates various prospective romantic pairings gone wrong. After all, he remarks, “the more times you present yourself to strangers, the more epiphanies about yourself you’re going to have.”

So far one major transformation has occurred every 14 to 15 years in Hill’s life—losing his vision, telling the truth about his disability and publishing a book about accepting it—and I ask whether this pattern offers a clue about future endeavors. Hill ponders this and declares with a laugh, “Look out, late 50s—I’ll be storming the world!”

Until then, Hill says he’s channeling his new self-awareness, self-acceptance and energy into writing “a weird speculative novel set in the malls of the 1980s and ’90s featuring child stars, some real and some fictional,” as well as into promotional events for Blind Man’s Bluff. He hopes his readers will come away with the realization that “accepting yourself for who you are is a choice. . . . I think your relationships deepen exponentially when you’re no longer hiding parts of yourself.”

As for himself, Hill says, “I acknowledge as blind. I identify as disabled. It may be trite to say this, but: It’s very liberating.”

 

Author photo credit © Lori Jackson Hill

Blind Man’s Bluff chronicles how James Tate Hill concealed the loss of his sight—and what he gained when he finally stopped hiding.
Science writer Mary Roach shares some highlights from her worldwide travels to collect stories of marauding monkeys, bandit bears and other fuzzy fugitives.
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“The great work of our lives is [figuring out] how to tell the story of our lives,” says Sarah Ruhl, speaking by phone from Chicago. Ruhl, a MacArthur Fellow and two-time Pulitzer finalist for drama, knows about stories. Her eye for detail is on full display in her memoir, Smile: The Story of a Face, which explores Ruhl’s experience with Bell’s palsy, a rare condition in which a part of the face becomes paralyzed. “The process of writing the book was cathartic,” Ruhl says, because for the first few years of her paralysis, “I wasn’t able to talk about my face. It was shoved deep under. But astonishingly, it was right on the surface.”

Quick, illuminating turns of phrase like that—shoved under but right on the surface—abound in Smile, which examines the paradoxes of illness, especially as experienced by women. The book historicizes the topic, recalling, for instance, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the short story that Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote after enduring bed rest as a medical treatment. The same doctor who prescribed this remedy for Gilman offered a different prescription for men: adventures on the Western frontier. “The 19th-century response is not as far away as we think,” says Ruhl, who was prescribed bed rest herself during her pregnancy, even though the treatment has had mixed results historically.

“I wasn’t able to talk about my face. It was shoved deep under. But astonishingly, it was right on the surface.”

Ruhl spent her time in bed reading the letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, thinking idly that they would make a good play (which she later wrote). She also dove unapologetically into the Twilight series. “We can’t predict how our minds will behave in extremis or when we are ill,” Ruhl says, remembering that when her father was sick with cancer, he read books about sea voyages. “Often you need something deeply plot-driven just to get through the stasis. You’re not able to look at the thing directly when you’re really scared about how your body is betraying you.” The epigraph in Smile, taken from Virginia Woolf, reiterates this point: “when the lights of health go down, undiscovered countries are then disclosed.”

Ruhl’s experience with Bell’s palsy began the morning after she gave birth to twins. A nurse entered her room and said, “Your eye looks droopy.” When Ruhl looked in the mirror, she writes, “I tried to move my face. Impossible. Puppet face, strings cut.” Bell’s palsy is typically a temporary facial paralysis that clears up completely in a matter of days or weeks—as opposed to Ruhl’s experience, which has lasted for over a decade, though the paralysis has lessened over time. Initially it impacted everything from chewing food to pronouncing words to conveying emotion. Writing about it required self-examination as she searched for ways to frame her experience. These framing lenses, which she calls “thinking lenses,” helped her “really feel what I was feeling about my face.”


ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Smile.


For example, Ruhl drew strength from public figures who’ve had facial paralysis, including the poet Allen Ginsburg. The book features a photograph of Ginsburg staring into the camera, forcing viewers to engage what Ruhl describes as “the disturbance” of his asymmetry. She also turned to art history, looking at Mona Lisa’s famous half-smile, a mismatched expression that captured the world’s interest. And, because of her connection to the theater, she examined theories about the link between facial expressions and emotion. “Thank God I am not an actor,” she says. “To have that instrument taken away as an actor would be so demoralizing.”

As Ruhl wrote about her face, she found she had a surprising amount to say—about women caught in ambiguous medical problems, about the face as the part of the body where the soul resides (or not) and about the difficulties of mothering young children while pursuing passionate, consuming work. Often these stories overlap, as in one memorable instance when she chose to breastfeed her child while on a stage in front of 300 people. Gloria Steinem was speaking when the baby began to fuss. Mary Rodgers, who wrote Freaky Friday, was seated next to Ruhl, and as Ruhl began to nurse her infant, Rodgers patted Ruhl’s leg and said, “That’s right, that’s right.” Ruhl excels at exploring connections like these, both near and distant, that help pull us through trouble.

“Sometimes teaching is no more than saying, ‘You can be a writer. Welcome to this secret society.’”

For Ruhl, this includes her connection with her husband, Tony. “My editor always wanted more scenes with Tony,” she laughs. And, indeed, when I talk about Smile with my friends, it’s a story about Tony that comes to mind: how Ruhl coined the phrase “sexy-cozy” to describe her feeling when he cared for her. “Sexy-cozy,” she writes in the book, “is the opposite of dirty-sexy.” Clearly this is a word that should be in wider circulation, one that would probably resonate with many happily married women, which is how Ruhl gratefully regards herself. “There’s something about the narrative of a happy marriage that we don’t see that much,” she says.

Ruhl also credits her teacher, Pulitzer-winning playwright Paula Vogel, for her support. “I wouldn’t be writing plays without Paula,” she says. “I think that Paula tapping me on the head and saying, ‘You can do this,’ was profoundly important. Sometimes teaching is no more than saying, ‘You can be a writer. Welcome to this secret society.’”

Though Ruhl’s journey with Bell’s palsy is not entirely resolved—she says that she is still thinking through how to live in her body, such as deciding whether she is willing to smile at people with her teeth—this warm-hearted, brave and funny memoir is her way of tapping readers on the head, encouraging us. You can keep going. You are part of the club. You are not alone.

Author photo credit: Gregory Costanzo

A playwright with an incredible eye for detail and a searing voice shares her own story of motherhood and facial paralysis.

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