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Until she moved to Columbus, Ohio, to pursue an M.F.A. in creative writing, Claire Vaye Watkins couldn’t imagine writing a story set in her home state of Nevada. Her early stories of young lovers and parents tended to be set in exotic locales like Hawaii, where, according to family mythology, her relatives ran a “mango-cum-pot farm.”

“It hadn’t occurred to me that Nevada or the desert was interesting to anyone,” she says by phone from Columbus.

Watkins, who is 28, now has what she calls a “big-girl job” teaching writing at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, but at the time of our conversation she’s back in Ohio for the graduation ceremonies of her beloved, writer Derek Palacio. “When I came to Ohio it was the first time that I had ever met people who weren’t from Nevada or California. It seems quaint to say the move changed my worldview. But it did. My friends from New Jersey would say, what a weird place Nevada is; did you ride your horses to school? So it occurred to me that it was interesting to people.”

Thus was born Watkins’ powerful debut collection of short stories, Battleborn (the book’s title derives from Nevada’s nickname, “the battle born state,” because it became a state during the Civil War).

“Early on I was often crippled about being able to write about anything, . . . Eventually I decided to choose place as my form,” she says. “By the end of the collection, I was actually looking at a map and thinking, where haven’t I written about? I couldn’t really start a story without understanding where it was set—because I can’t really start to think about who these characters are and what kind of trouble are they going to get into if I don’t even know what they see when they get up in the morning.”

"I think my relationship to my dad and his involvement in the Manson family has always been a storytelling relationship."

And Watkins’ characters do get into all kinds of trouble. In the electrifying story “Rondine Al Nido,” for example, a 30-year-old woman trades stories with a new lover about shameful things they’ve done in the past and remembers herself at 16 traveling from a small Nevada town to Las Vegas with a naïve friend, looking for danger, and pushing her friend toward self-destruction among a group of frat boys.

“Some people have said my [stories] are gritty, but I don’t think of it like that at all. I just want to be true to real experience. So thinking about a teenager in rural Nevada who lives over the mountain range from Las Vegas like the girls in ‘Rondine Al Nido,’ well, we used to take those trips all the time, tell our parents we were staying at someone’s house and then go into Vegas to see if we could get into some trouble. I didn’t want to whitewash it by saying this was just a story of hijinks, like getting change out of the fountains and buying hamburgers with it. We were after danger and destruction there.”

Many of the characters in Battleborn teeter at the edge of physical or psychological catastrophe. But in the best of these 10 stories, Watkins’ prose possesses the bright clarity of desert sunlight—she has been compared to Joan Didion—with the result that even her most lacerating tales can be oddly exhilarating.

The first and best story in the collection is “Ghosts, Cowboys,” a haunting exploration of the troubling mythologies surrounding her father, Paul Watkins, an early and important member of the Charles Manson family.

“I don’t know much about my dad. He had Hodgkins disease and died when I was six,” Watkins says. “So it’s hard to know if I actually remember anything about him. Stories become memories, you know? And in our family the stories that you tell about dead people are pretty flat, so that person becomes a very one-dimensional character. I mean the stories I get from my family about my dad are: He was a good man and he loved you very much. That’s not really enough. I have been so very, very curious about him my entire life.”

Watkins says she discovered that her father had been a member of the Manson family when she was 10. “I learned because a kid had been teasing my sister at school about it. We came home and asked my mom. And she said, yeah, he was in the Manson family but he didn’t kill anyone, and she gave us Helter Skelter. We looked him up in the index and read about him. We were happy that he hadn’t killed anyone and we just kind of went on with our lives,” she says.

“I think my relationship to my dad and to his involvement in the Manson family has always been a storytelling relationship. I have been asked in the past if I’m interested in writing a memoir about it. But that doesn’t really interest me. On the other hand, it is interesting to think about him in terms of the American West and my own family mythology. I think that’s why fiction is the place that I worked it out, or tried to. I think that felt right because art is about trying to understand yourself and who we are.”

Watkins says one of her earliest introductions to storytelling culture came through Alcoholics Anonymous. Her mother and stepfather “were in recovery and were very involved in the 12-step club. I spent much of my childhood in the car. When we lived in Tecopa, California [a town of 100 inhabitants in the Mojave Desert on the southern edge of Death Valley], there was no grocery store or hardware store there. So once or twice a month, usually on the first or the 15th, we would drive either into Pahrump, Nevada, where there was a grocery store which was quite expensive, or we’d drive into Las Vegas. And we would listen to AA tapes in the car on those long drives,” she recalls.

“AA is a culture where the story, your story, is really important. But it’s not just any story, it’s your rock-bottom story, your worst story. I think that sometimes gets simplified into: It was bad and now it’s good. So we used to listen to these speaker tapes that were really thrilling to me for probably like the first 90 percent, and then the last 10 percent came—you know I was a kid—and I remember asking my mom: can I listen to something else?”

As a teenager, Watkins planned to become a filmmaker rather than a writer. By the time she entered the University of Nevada, Reno as an undergraduate, her ambition was “to be a geologist and a feminist critic. But that didn’t work out.” Besides, she’d run into Christopher Coake, a teacher she refers to as “my guy, my mentor and my friend.” He and a handful of writers whose writing stayed with her—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Amy Bender, Louise Erdrich, Joan Didion, Mary Gaitskill—made a writing career imaginable.

In Battleborn, the first step of that career, Watkins undertakes some astonishing fictional explorations of the mythologies that have shaped her—from family stories to the lore of the American West.

The stand-out novella-length “The Diggins,” for example, is a harrowing Gold Rush-era story of two brothers who come West from Ohio to make their fortunes in the goldfields. In it Watkins deftly mimics the syntax of 19th-century 49ers’ letters while at the same time exploring the violent, despairing human stories at the root of our national myths of Manifest Destiny and rugged individualism.

Much closer to home is “The Archivist,” a story in which the central character imagines a museum of lost love curated from the detritus left in her exes’ jeans pockets. “The moment when the character says the mother wing of the museum would probably be empty?” says Watkins, whose mother died of a prescription-drug overdose the month before she graduated from college. “My own mother wing would probably be a not-very curated place, very messy and very chaotic. I think I’ll probably be sorting that stuff out for the rest of my life.”

Until she moved to Columbus, Ohio, to pursue an M.F.A. in creative writing, Claire Vaye Watkins couldn’t imagine writing a story set in her home state of Nevada. Her early stories of young lovers and parents tended to be set in exotic locales like Hawaii, where, according to family mythology, her relatives ran a “mango-cum-pot […]
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Some months after he won the Pulitzer Prize for his dazzling first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz overheard a friend telling other friends: Listen, Junot won the Pulitzer Prize and we never had a party, we never went out for drinks, he like never mentioned it!

“I would point out that I come from a family where there was no celebration of AN-Y-THING!” Díaz says during a call that reaches him in Boston. Díaz teaches writing and “the traditional grammars of storytelling” to “super-energized kids” studying new media at MIT during the spring semester. He lives and writes in Manhattan the rest of the year.

Díaz, who was born in the Dominican Republic in 1968 and moved to a working-class, immigrant community downwind from one of the largest landfills in central New Jersey in 1974, explains that he grew up in a military family where the attitude was: Why should we bake a cake for you for doing what is considered your duty?

“Prizes are wonderful,” Díaz says. “They sell your books, they get you invited to places you would never be invited. I would never give mine back. But I know them fundamentally for what they are. They’re just today’s applause. They have no bearing on whether a piece of art or an artist will exist into the future. I’m more preoccupied with that. And I think that preoccupation frees your art in lots of ways.”

Of course, artistic freedom has its price. The vaulting energy and seeming spontaneity that are among the hallmarks of Díaz’s breathtaking stories and his novel arise from exacting labor. “I’m such a slow writer,” Díaz says. “I require absolute solitude. I am part of the no-distractions universe.” He says he conceived of the shape and texture of his new story collection, This Is How You Lose Her, in 1995, so it has taken him roughly 17 years to bring it to fruition.

"The one principle that we have in literature and art is that the universal arises from the particular."

“I needed a framework to start out. I had this idea of writing a book of collected stories about the rise and fall of a cheater. What drove me nuts was getting this whole thing from beginning to end pieced together. It’s like building a building. I won’t say it’s like building a cathedral, but it’s sort of like building a barn. You want to get it working and you want to get everything fitted nicely,” he says. “What drove me bananas was searching for, wrestling with the missing beams. Had it been a novel, I think it would have been a very different book, and one day I will write a novel about the rise and fall of a cheater, but I wanted to do this as a kind of fragmentary whole.”

The nine stories in This Is How You Lose Her, with settings in Santo Domingo, New Jersey and Boston, and told from third, second and first person points of view, do indeed explore, among other things, the vicissitudes of loving and being loved by another human being. In the story “Otravida, Otravez,” for example, Yasmin, who works in a hospital laundry room where she does her lover’s laundry in secret, is buoyed by her lover’s hopeful seriousness that they will soon buy a house together and crushed by thoughts of the letters her lover’s wife sends to him from back home in the Dominican Republic. But there are also stories like “Invierno,” an aching portrayal of the chilling isolation of young children who arrive to begin new lives in the United States in the dead of winter.  In the vortex of many of these stories is Díaz’s recurring character Yunior.

“Really why I’m drawn back to Yunior consistently, persistently has a lot to do with who the hell this guy is. Yunior is someone who recognizes at an intuitive level, at an emotional level and at an intellectual level how ­f__ked up and flawed he is. He has a heart with a utopian impulse. He wants to be in love. He wants a normal, healthy, nourishing relationship. He knows that one of the great challenges of the human condition is to connect with someone else, fundamentally and intimately, and he longs for that. He has all these recognitions, but he’s not capable of stopping himself from doing all the f__ked up things he wants to do. He’s got this tragic condition where he can recognize in himself his limitations, but he doesn’t have the strength to transcend them. But he’s also aware that there’s a social dimension for his problems. I don’t think he looks at the social dimension to escape responsibility or blame. He’s the kind of guy who in condemning himself throws a light onto the world we live in. Which is quite different from condemning the world as a way to avoid recognizing the part we play in it.”

Asked about the autobiographical nature of these stories, which in some ways mirror the physical and emotional geographies of his own life, Díaz says, “The way you’ve got to chip your life away for it to work as a story or as a novel is just incredibly deforming. By the time you get done wrangling your life into the form that can fit into the box of fiction, it doesn’t look like your life anymore.”

Still, these stories—all of his work, in fact—generate voltage from Díaz’s uncommon ability to evoke the alternating currents, the back and forth toggle from one culture to another, that comprise a soul-wrenching dimension of first-generation immigrant life. Díaz’s stories also deploy a scintillating blend of English and Spanish and broad literary references. His books—and conversation—romp from smooth academic-literary tonalities to earthy descriptiveness and expletives and back again. All of which, Díaz indicates, is consciously used to capture the particularity of contemporary human experience.

“Thermodynamics has these neat, tidy little laws that hold true, and evolution has all these great little principles that hold true. The one principle that we have in literature and art is that the universal arises from the particular. It’s the actual thumbprint uniqueness, it’s the granular idiosyncratic, one-of-a-kindness of a work of art that gives it power across time, across space, across language, that allows it to clear that most terrible of all barriers, the barrier that separates one soul from another. We’re still reading Shakespeare because Shakespeare was so incredibly particular. . . . Hamlet rings across the ages because Hamlet is a f__king Dane, not in spite of it.”

Díaz, a voracious reader who walked miles to his local library to borrow books as a child, credits Sandra Cisneros with opening his eyes to his literary mission. “She was the first contemporary Latina author that I ever met. Her book Woman Hollering Creek was everywhere during my first year in college. I had never seen a book like that. I grew up in central Jersey. I grew up listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees and the f__king Furious Five. I felt there wasn’t anything that was coming close to our experience, you know? My entire cohort of friends were college nerds, we were kids who worked and went to school, and I felt, wow, who is covering that experience? Then I encountered Woman Hollering Creek and the Brothers Hernandez’s Love and Rockets comics and I suddenly recognized the dimensions of my calling.”

Reading, Díaz says, remains central to that calling. “I cannot write without having at my back a whole bunch of works and books and authors who came before,” he says. “What feeds my writing is reading.”

Then Díaz shifts the discussion back to teaching. “For me teaching is a wonderful civic duty, a great way of giving back. There’s that Maya Angelou sense that the debt of knowing is to teach. I’m teaching at the heart of what we could call the practical machine. If there is any place where this country’s indifference to art and its sense that art is at best a privilege and at worst irrelevant [could make sense], it would be an institution like MIT,” he says.

“What really pulls me to this teaching is that I take kids who have a billion reasons why they shouldn’t spend a nickel’s time on art and try to convert them to the belief that there is no authentic human life possible without an engagement in art. If I can do that, well, I feel like I’ve done a f__king good thing.”

Some months after he won the Pulitzer Prize for his dazzling first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz overheard a friend telling other friends: Listen, Junot won the Pulitzer Prize and we never had a party, we never went out for drinks, he like never mentioned it! “I would point out […]
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Award-winning writer Joan Silber returns with another stunning collection of linked stories. The characters in Fools span generations and continents, but are linked by the glow of their ideals, whether obsessive and dangerous or positive and world-changing. We asked Silber a few questions about her writing process and the inspiration behind the new book.

You have written linked stories before. What is it about multiple stories dealing with a single theme and overlapping characters that appeals to you? 
It began two books ago, with Ideas of Heaven, and I love this form. It lets me come in very close to a character and then move on to a different angle.  It seems to give a larger canvas (something I always wanted when I was a novelist).   

Is there a story that you wrote first that led to the others, or do you map all the connections out at the beginning? 
The first story was "Fools," about a young woman who's an anarchist in the 1920s. I saw that I was interested in how people live for ideas—and can they live without them?—and this helped me come up with other stories. One of my favorite characters is Louise, daughter of politically principled parents who feels she can hold "two opinions" at once, even about marriage. I have to say I didn't have a plan for the book and the connections were formed from my own obsessions (like: How does money fit in?) and a curiosity about how certain characters turned out. I was especially happy when I found a way to revisit Liliane, who's a conniving young woman in Paris in one story and an elegant older woman in New York in another. 

Some of these stories refer to very specific political situations in the 1920s, the 1950s and the present. What similarities do you see among these times? 
What an interesting question. The stories do use our country's fear of political radicals—in the '20s  the Sacco-Vanzetti case and in the 1950s the "blacklisting" of suspected communists—and later the post-9/11 fear of Muslims. I didn't call up these parallels on purpose, but my characters naturally encounter these spells of public panic. As it happened, in the last stages of writing the book, Occupy Wall Street was in the news, with an analysis of capitalism not very different from that of the anarchists I began with.

I think longing is a component of being human. It controls our relation to time—we're always watching to see if we'll get what we want.

What kind of research did you do for these stories? 
I read the writings of Dorothy Day and some biographies of her. I read oral histories of old anarchists and of pacifists against World War II. I had a friend tell me about neighborhoods in Paris in the early 1960s. I read biographies of Gandhi. I got a student in a summer program to tell me about growing up in Okinawa. I read about Sufism, since I was traveling to Turkey anyway. And I kept looking up things online—how much money did Madoff steal? what was that beach I went to in Mumbai?  I would gladly dawdle the day away doing research—and finding great details helps me invent.

In "The Hanging Fruit" and "Two Opinions," you create the span of almost an entire life in a single story. What kinds of challenges does that pose? 
It was a great discovery for me that short stories could contain long time spans. The challenge is: Summarized action can be very washy to read. But I think it can be written so it's like a series of mini-scenes. The prose can be concrete and striking.  And I like to show how change accrues gradually.  

There is a real intimacy created between the reader and your first-person narrators. What does that point of view add to the storytelling? 
I'm interested in what characters say to themselves, what they make of what they've done; I think of first-person narration as translating thoughts (as opposed to mimicking speech). I'm especially attached to those moments when a narrator makes a sweeping self-description. That said, I did experiment in this book with stories in third-person ("Better" and "Buying and Selling") and found I could get the same effects.

Your characters all long for something—political, spiritual, sexual—sometimes a combination of the three! How do you think that longing informs our lives? 
In real life, I'm a relatively contented person, but I think longing is a component of being human. It controls our relation to time—we're always watching to see if we'll get what we want. In my plots, characters don't always know what they want at first—they often have an inaccurate idea of what they long for.   

Who are some of your favorite writers and what makes them special to you?
My biggest influences are Chekhov and Alice Munro—Chekhov for the way he can shift our sympathies toward a character who has seemed for most of the story not to deserve them, and Munro for her use of long time spans and for the uncommon length of her stories, whose shapes we often don't see till the end. Both writers show us what we didn't know by shifting the perspective of the story. I'm also a fan of David Malouf and Colm Toibin. And I just belatedly discovered Pat Barker.]

What are you reading now?
I'm glad you asked—I'm totally immersed in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. I don't even know why it's so good.  It's chock full of truly shocking bits of history—eye-opening in a very substantial way—and has a character who learns everything from the bottom up and can't be outsmarted, on a colossal scale.

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Read our review of Fools.

Award-winning writer Joan Silber returns with another stunning collection of linked stories. The characters in Fools span generations and continents, but are linked by the glow of their ideals, whether obsessive and dangerous or positive and world-changing. We asked Silber a few questions about her writing process and the inspiration behind the new book. You […]
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Katherine Hall Page’s award-winning Faith Fairchild mysteries have delighted readers since 1991, when she released her debut, The Body in the Belfry, and introduced the world to her charming caterer and sleuth. Small Plates, Page’s first collection of short stories, is filled with wit and intricately spun mysteries, along with decadent descriptions of all things culinary. While Faith makes plenty of appearances in stories such as “The Body in the Dunes,” new characters shine just as brightly in “The Would-Be Widower” and “Hiding Places.” Cozy mystery lovers are sure to find a tale to sate their appetite here.

Small Plates is your first collection of short stories. What advantages does this format lend to the mystery genre?
The brevity of a short story gives mystery writers a chance to pack a wallop. In the traditional mystery novel, the pace is more leisurely, albeit suspenseful. The denouement comes at the end and the hope is that readers will be stunned. Yet, the end of each chapter has a tantalizing hook baited to keep those pages turning. In the short story, all this must be compressed. Poe and Saki did it best.

What are the biggest challenges in crafting a successful short story?
In the introduction I quote Henry David Thoreau: “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short” and Edgar Allan Poe, “A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build toward it.” Taken together, these are a fine summation of the challenge posed by short story writing: that paring-down process, the examination of each word essential for a satisfactory result. I’d also add a reminder based on advice from Strunk and White—nowhere is omitting needless words more essential!

Many of these stories feature Faith Fairchild, a sleuth you have featured in 21 previous novels. Did you discover anything new about Faith during the writing process?
This is a terrific question and something I had not considered before. One of the pleasures of writing a series is “growing” a character and Faith Fairchild has certainly changed over the years—as have we all!—yet yes, I did discover something new about the character in this book, specifically in the story, “Sliced.” Not exactly a dark side, but most assuredly darker, and it was freeing to write about her this way.

Who are some of your favorite short story writers?
A wide-ranging bunch: again Poe and Saki. Theirs are among the first short stories I read when young, as well as O. Henry’s “The Last Leaf” and, similar in spirit, de Maupassant’s “The Necklace.” Others in no particular order: Melville, Dorothy Sayers, James Thurber, Willa Cather, Oscar Wilde, Eudora Welty, Alice Munro, Carson McCullers. John Cheever, J.D. Salinger, James Joyce, Shirley Jackson, Agatha Christie, Flannery O’Connor, Ellen Gilchrist, Laurie Colwin, Wodehouse, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Robert Barnard. Heresy, but I am not a Hemingway fan.

Many of these stories—especially “The Would-Be Widower”—feature some delightfully dark humor. How important is humor in your writing?
Extremely important, although in life, there is nothing remotely funny about murder. That said, I have always enjoyed crime fiction with this kind of twist. Besides the dark humor aspect to these stories and my novels, I like to add other forms of comic relief as a break from sitting on the edge of one’s chair. Often this takes the form of a character.

Are there any new characters in these short stories that could pop up in your future novels?
Yes! I became wrapped up in Polly Ackroyd in “Across the Pond,” who bears more than a passing resemblance to a Nancy Mitford-type character. I’m not sure where Polly might appear, but since I made her a friend of both Faith Fairchild and her sister, it might happen!

Many of these stories feature your famously mouthwatering descriptions of food. If you had your own restaurant, what type of cuisine would be on your menu?
Many years ago when I was young and more foolish, I thought about opening a seasonal restaurant on an island in Maine using local ingredients—the menu an earlier version of the slow food movement. While I think some of this cuisine has veered off into cloud cuckoo land (do we really need to know the name of the cow that gave the milk for the butter?), it is still what I would do. I also like borrowing from a number of regional and international cuisines with ingredients like pomegranate molasses, Anson Mills grits, elderflower liqueur and smoked paprika. I’ve never met a cheese I didn’t like, nor a salad green. Nothing fussy though, or architectural.

What are you working on next?
I am finishing up the 22nd novel in the Faith Fairchild series, The Body in the Birches. It is set on the fictitious island, Sanpere, I created in Penobscot Bay, Maine. Aside from what I hope is the gripping mystery component, the whodunit puzzle—it’s a book about families, specifically the turmoil created by the inheritance of property. In this case, the clash is over a summer home that has been in a family for generations. We all know real estate can be murder.

Katherine Hall Page’s award-winning Faith Fairchild mysteries have delighted readers since 1991, when she released her debut, The Body in the Belfry, and introduced the world to her charming caterer and sleuth. Small Plates, Page’s first collection of short stories, is filled with wit and intricately spun mysteries, along with decadent descriptions of all things culinary. While Faith makes plenty of appearances in stories such as “The Body in the Dunes,” new characters shine just as brightly in “The Would-Be Widower” and “Hiding Places.” Cozy mystery lovers are sure to find a tale to sate their appetite here.
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'Tis the season for spooky reads! As the days in October get a little colder and the nights get a little longer, it's the perfect time to curl up with best-selling author Audrey Niffenegger's new and lovingly curated collection of ghost stories, Ghostly. Featuring Niffenegger's original illustrations and a few of her own stories alongside classics (Poe's "The Black Cat")  and newer works by Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link, readers are sure to find something that moves and quietly haunts them in this book. 

We asked Niffenegger a few questions about her creative process for Ghostly, her favorite scary story, her next project and more.

Which story in this collection scares you the most?
None of them scare me. Some of them make me sad, some of them are extremely beautiful, all of them are surprising and strange. None of them make me want to go to bed with the lights on. This isn’t a book of horror stories.

Can you tell us a bit about your artistic process for the illustrations in Ghostly?
Read the story a few times, wander away to answer email, drink some coffee, read the story again, forget about it for a couple of weeks while attending to more urgent deadlines. Have an idea about the image while washing dishes. Make a sketch, realize that I need a picture reference. Get lost in Google Images for a while. Draw the image. Give the drawing to Ken Gerleve, my assistant, who does helpful things to it on the computer. Send resulting scans to Suzanne Dean who incorporates the image into the design of the book.

The book design (cover art, typography, illustrations) was a collaboration between Suzanne Dean and me. Before any illustrations were made, we discussed ideas for the design and once the stories were chosen we sent designs and images back and forth. Suzanne is wonderful to work with, it was a pleasure to see my images transformed into the book.

Do you think what scares us has changed over time?
Probably not. I’m sure most of it is hard wired into our brains: fear of death, fire, heights, snakes, public speaking, etc. The trick is to find things that are not all that scary, mix them with the horrible things and refine it all into a good story that is haunting.

Do you believe in ghosts?
Nope.

Have you ever been inside a haunted house?
Sorry, no.

Was there a piece of fiction you wanted to include in Ghostly, but couldn’t quite fit?
Beloved, by Toni Morrison.

What are the most fun and the most challenging parts of writing a spooky piece of fiction like “Secret Life, with Cats” or your previous novel, Her Fearful Symmetry?
I am not especially interested in frightening people. I’m more attracted to loss, guilt, grief, longing and solitude. So both “Secret Life, With Cats” and Her Fearful Symmetry are about lonely people trying to regain what they have lost or, failing that, trying to move on. The fun bits involve thinking up special effects. The hard part is making the things that are important to the characters become important to the readers.

What is your favorite scary story?
The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James.

Do you have a favorite Halloween tradition?
When I taught etching I used to read “The Mezzotint” by M.R. James to my students on Halloween.

Why do you think ghost stories, specifically many of these domestically-focused stories in Ghostly, are so enduring and popular?
There’s something wonderful about the intersection of the ordinary and the impossible. These stories are like rollercoasters, controlled thrills. We love to be scared, but not too much.

What are you working on next?
I’m working on a sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife. It’s called The Other Husband. It is about Alba DeTamble as a grownup.

'Tis the season for spooky reads! As the days in October get a little colder and the nights get a little longer, it's the perfect time to curl up with best-selling author Audrey Niffenegger's new and lovingly curated collection of ghost stories, Ghostly. Featuring Niffenegger's original illustrations and a few of her own stories alongside classics (Poe's "The Black Cat") and newer works by Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link, readers are sure to find something that moves and quietly haunts them in this book.

To bring to life the words of a seminal writer of the Harlem Renaissance is no small feat. The 21 short stories in Zora Neale Hurston’s Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick reveal a writer early in her career, incorporating dialect and other language that may not easily translate to contemporary listeners’ ears. But Aunjanue Ellis brings more than 25 years of experience acting in TV and film—including The Taking of Pelham 123, The Help, “The Book of Negroes” and “Quantico”—to her first audiobook narration, and her performance of Hitting a Straight Lick smooths any barrier between historical tale and modern audience.

We reached out to Ellis about her experience narrating Hitting a Straight Lick, her own connection to Hurston and her love of books.

Tell me a bit about transforming Hitting a Straight Lick into an audiobook. How did you prepare, and what did you most enjoy about the preparation?
I read the stories and then re-read the stories. I would have to go over several passages over and over before recording. The enjoyment came from the reading. This collection has such electric, surprising writing. I fell in love with ZHurston all over again.

“This collection has such electric, surprising writing.”

Tell us about your personal connection to Hurston prior to narrating the audiobook.
Their Eyes Were Watching God was one of those books that shaped my understanding of what great writing is. So years ago, I tried to write a screenplay about Zora. I had no experience writing a screenplay and gave up on the project after months of trying. It is my hope that it gets done—the movie on her life. I may not write it but the world needs to see it. And actually, I played Zora in a film that Rodney Evans directed called Brother to Brother.

What was the most difficult part of bringing Hurston’s signature dialect style to life?
The difficult part is that it is dialect! I have to say it is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. The director had to push me to finish toward the end because it was so hard, and I was exhausted. I wasn’t just reading. I was performing all those rich characters that Zora created. I had to find their differences, even if it was just hair’s breath. And the dialect is another language. So I had to approach it like I was speaking another language. There were words that are obsolete or arcane. And the way that it is written—graphically—it requires your eyes to work differently and more specifically. It was the hardest thing I have done as a performer.

“You have the voice of someone who adores you taking you on an adventure that you can only see in the matinee theatre of your mind.”

Was there anything you felt strongly about getting “right” as you narrated the work of such a definitive icon of the Harlem Renaissance?
Yes, that’s why it was so hard, because I wanted the dialect to sound as Zora heard it. Also, sometimes Zora would write the same character and also repeat plots in different iterations in several stories. I wanted to make sure though that the reader would hear them differently every time.

How does the experience of narrating an audiobook differ from other kinds of performance? What’s the hardest part of limiting your acting toolbox to just your voice?
I’m not good in recording studios! I’m usually a very amiable actor until it’s time for me to do ADR—that’s when you have to add or replace dialogue from scenes you’ve shot. I get very impatient, and do-overs bother me, AND it’s claustrophobic. So when I did this, it was ADR maximized. And I think you’ve hit in the question partly as to why it’s troublesome for me: I can only use my voice. There are no other tricks to use, because no one can see me. And also, I am alone. No scene partners. Just me and a taunting microphone. I have SO much respect now for actors who do this as a profession. Doing the book was incredibly and surprisingly difficult, but I had an immeasurable reward. I lived with Zora and the citizens of her great world for days.

Hitting a Straight LickWhat were you surprised to learn about the audiobook process?
I was surprised at how exacting it is. You can’t leave out or add words, which I do all the time when I perform in other mediums. You realize that the words are queen. You must perform them exactly how they are written. To not do that is to deny the listener the book.

As someone who holds a B.A. in African American studies, did you come to Hurston’s short story collection with any kind of expectations about her work? Did these short stories change your ideas of Hurston as a writer?
The first story in the collection, “John Redding Goes to Sea,” was one of my favorites. It is so supple and delicate to the ear. Zora has such a keen eye and ear to the myriad ways her characters express grief, longing and joy. She is utterly modern in that way. I was compelled to read more of her shorter work. It was like discovering a new writer. Everything I assumed and took for granted about her work was called into question.

What do you believe are your greatest strengths as a narrator? What is the most rewarding or coolest thing you get to bring to this experience through your reading?
I just didn’t want to embarrass Zora. So that was my strength: fear! It is an unparalleled motivator to not screw things up. And I had it!

What do audiobooks offer that a book can’t? And considering how much audiobooks are booming, why do you think we’re being drawn to this medium more and more?
Well, I’m a book NERD! I love everything about them. They are a fetish. The feel of them. The smell of them. The buying of them. Bookstores are my temples. So this is a complicated question for me. Telling a story is one of the first acts of love an adult gives to a child. You have the voice of someone who adores you taking you on an adventure that you can only see in the matinee theatre of your mind. My love for stories and reading has never strayed from this idea. I think this is the innate beauty and gravity of audiobooks.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick and our audiobook review.

Actor Aunjanue Ellis discusses her experience narrating Zora Neale Hurston’s collection of short stories.
Review by

Racism is an insidious beast. It can find its way into any situation, as Danielle Evans shows in the stories and novella in The Office of Historical Corrections. Evans emerged as an important voice in American literature with her 2010 debut short story collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, and she once again demonstrates impressive artistry and humor as she chronicles shocking episodes of discriminatory behavior.

In “Happily Ever After,” Lyssa works in the gift shop for a replica of the Titanic, but she never gets to work the museum’s princess parties because, her boss says, of historical accuracy: There were no Black princesses on the Titanic. In “Boys Go to Jupiter,” a white college student poses for pictures in a Confederate-flag bikini and is surprised by the pain it causes Black students. Other stories dig deeper, such as “Anything Could Disappear,” about a Black woman forced to care for a 2-year-old Black child who is deliberately left next to her on a bus by the child’s white caregiver.

Not every story deals with race, as with the funniest story, “Why Won’t Women Just Say What They Want,” in which a “genius artist” stages public apologies to the women he has wronged. However, most stories do, and the sharpest piece is the title novella, about a government agency that adds emendations to incorrect placards at historical sites, a job that becomes surprisingly dangerous. As a child, the novella’s protagonist consoled a Black friend who had lost a debate tournament, declaring her a better debater than her white competitors. “But it’s never going to be enough,” replied the friend. Evans’ book shows that that painful truth hasn’t disappeared.

Danielle Evans emerged as an important voice in American literature with her 2010 debut short story collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, and she once again demonstrates impressive artistry and humor as she chronicles shocking episodes of discriminatory behavior.

Interview by

Sherman Alexie may be one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation. The author of such novels as Reservation Blues and Indian Killer is also a poet and a screenwriter (Smoke Signals, The Business of Fancydancing). Alexie is a literary force to be reckoned with, but he watches "American Idol" like the rest of us. Award-winning authors need downtime, too.

Even while channel-surfing on the couch, his young son beside him, Alexie is doing more than meets the eye. During an early-morning phone call to his home in Seattle, Alexie says, "We've lost old ceremonies and we're casting about looking for new ones. And we don't know yet if they're going to work or not." Ceremonies like watching "American Idol"? Alexie, a fan of pop culture, says yes.

"There's a hell of a lot of people watching this with me right now, and I thought, well, that's a ceremony, and we can't diminish the importance of that. We still have all those ceremonies, that shared stuff, the rituals, it's just that we don't learn anything through [them], nobody learns anything by watching American Idol,' nobody is challenged. Our ceremonies now don't require us to be conscious. That's what they're supposed to do."

MAKING CONNECTIONS
Alexie's latest collection of short stories, Ten Little Indians, tells the stories of people in search of the rituals and ceremonies that lend life meaning. They are characters longing for authentic connections with others; they are everyday people, Native Americans, trying to navigate their way through the modern world. Ten Little Indians holds within its pages many journeys, at once ordinary and epic. As Alexie says of his characters, "Everybody's on a religious quest, everybody's a pilgrim."

There is Corliss in "The Search Engine," a student on the trail of an elusive poet, trying to discover her own identity. There is Jackson in "What You Pawn I Will Redeem," a homeless Indian who must raise $1,000 in 24 hours to buy back his grandmother's powwow regalia stolen years earlier. The image we are left with at the end of this story is so stirring and powerful it lingers like an aftershock.

In "What Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church?," the final story in the collection, a once well-known basketball player honors his father's death by obsessively throwing himself back into a sport he sacrificed long ago. Witnessing him work through his grief is, at times, a painful thing to see, but Alexie doesn't go in for tidy resolutions or anything that smacks of sentimentality. "I wanted all these stories to be love stories and not happy endings, sanitized love stories, but the real mess. . . . Love is shaky, and magical, and terrifying," says Alexie.

Though, at this early hour, Alexie is soft-spoken, his tone bears a trace of the raw, bold voice behind his writing. In what is sure to be one of the more controversial stories in the collection, "Can I Get a Witness?," an act of terrorism brings two strangers into an even stranger alliance. Here Alexie, an outspoken peace activist, demonstrates once again that he has the courage to speak his truth, to question long-held beliefs and the status quo. Of this he says, "It's our job. We're artists. We're supposed to be loud and poetic and crass and inappropriate."

Alexie's writing, though provocative, is also funny. "It's the way I look at the world, with humor, and it's not necessarily on purpose. My family is very funny, and in fact if you put my brothers and sisters and [me] together, you find I'm the least funny one," Alexie says. "It certainly is a family way of looking at the world, and my tribe in a sense too; there's a lot of humor. In the Northwest especially, the joke is that if you have a gathering of Native Americans from all over the country, you know where the Northwest Indians are because they're the loud laughing ones."

"I didn't know I was going to be a funny writer," Alexie says. "I just started writing and people laughed. And at first I was sort of offended. I expected, like many young people, that writing was supposed to be so serious that if people were laughing it couldn't be serious. But I've learned that humor can be very serious. You know if you have people laughing, you can talk about very difficult subjects. I use it as an aesthetic I suppose I should say anesthetic and also to be profane and blasphemous. There's nothing I like more than laughing at other people's idea of the sacred."

KEEPING THE CULTURE ALIVE
In Ten Little Indians, as in his other works, Alexie also explores questions of identity, both personal and cultural. Corliss, a latent poet in "The Search Engine" says, "no matter what I write, a bunch of other Indians will hate it because it isn't Indian enough, and a bunch of white people will only like it because it's Indian." Asked if Alexie shares these sentiments, he says that at times he does feel "trapped by other people's ideas of who I am and who I'm supposed to be . . . there are so many ideas about Indians, none of which we created. It's a special situation being colonized people where the colonizers always get to define us and that still happens."

Asked about Native American culture being relegated to museums, Alexie says, "I love museums, but for me the greatest part of all this is I'm a completely active member of the culture. Forgive the immodesty, but I think it's much more important for an Indian like me to be in The New Yorker magazine than it is for me or an Indian to be in a museum [so that] we join the culture rather than become a separate part of it. It's great to talk about traditions and to see them represented and to get a sense of history, but I think it's more important to change the possibilities of what an Indian is and can be right now.

"We're not separate, we're not removed, we're an integral and living part of the culture." Sherman Alexie, master of many mediums and a gifted storyteller, is living proof of that fact.

 

Katherine H. Wyrick, a former editor of BookPage, lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Sherman Alexie may be one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation. The author of such novels as Reservation Blues and Indian Killer is also a poet and a screenwriter (Smoke Signals, The Business of Fancydancing). Alexie is a literary force to be reckoned with, but he watches "American Idol" like the rest of […]

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