5 Questions with Matthew Specktor, Author of Always Crashing in the Same Car

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound; a nonfiction book, The Sting; and the forthcoming memoir The Golden Hour (Ecco/HarperCollins). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Paris Review, The Believer, Tin House, Vogue, GQ, Black Clock, and Open City. He has been a MacDowell fellow, and is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He resides in Los Angeles. His newest book is Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California, published by Tin House. Matthew Specktor will be in conversation with Adam Pfahler (of Jawbreaker!) in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on Wednesday, July 28th, 2021!

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Where are you writing to us from?

Los Angeles, which I often think is a condition of the spirit as much as it is a geography. I know people in the Bay Area have, erm, mixed feelings about LA (who threw that tomato that just whistled by my ear?), but, alas, here I am.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

Nobody told me I was supposed to remain sane! Perhaps I should have planned it differently. But—my wife, our dog (an incredibly neurotic Schnauzer/Wheaten mix whose sanity is questionable, herself), our subscription to the Criterion Channel, and very carefully measured amounts of tequila-with-lime have all helped.

What books are you reading right now? Which books to you return to?

Right now I’m on an absolute bender with the books published by a collective called Deluge. One of their founders, Emily Segal, wrote a novel called Mercury Retrograde that came out in late 2020 and just knocked me flat. It combines a DeLillo-grade intelligence—a way of slicing experience very, very fine—with a kind of wild humor and a sharp, feminist perspective. It’s amazing.

As for books I return to, well, there are far too many of those to keep count, but I’ll mention Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, and James Baldwin’s Another Country as touchstones for me. But there are so many!

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

Leaving aside that this book is, in some sense, a catalogue of its own influences—Thomas McGuane, Renata Adler, Hal Ashby, Carole Eastman: I mean, the book is explicitly about a number of people who’ve influenced me—I would say again that there are far too many to count.

Some recent-ish books that influenced the writing of this one include Hilton Als’s The Women, Heidi Julavits’s The Folded Clock: A Diary, Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, and Leslie Jameson’s The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath. These are all books that combine memoir with criticism or with other forms of observation.

Some writers, both contemporary and otherwise, who’ve influenced me include Jonathan Lethem, James Salter, Michael Ondaatje, Rachel Cusk, Yiyun Li, Elizabeth Hardwick, Philip Roth, Ivan Turgenev, and Paul Beatty. I mean, some of those people are friends; others I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting as a Vintage paperback or an NYRB classic; some are in vogue, others slightly less so, and I don’t think, alas, I sound like any of them. But I’m a big tent person when it comes to influence. You read as much and as widely as you can and you invite it all in.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

Ah. Now we get to the serious question. It would be in West LA. I would build it over the bones of what used to be Dutton’s Books, in Brentwood, because that was the bookstore I grew up with and every time I drive past the location—it used to be a coffee shop before the pandemic; right now it’s just a boarded-up storefront—I get sad. I’d name it after The Transit of Venus (“Transit Books?” I dunno), because that book changed my life about as forcefully as any book can: it launched my career as a screenwriter, led me to my first literary agent, and to a friendship with Shirley; above all, it changed my life as a reader, and my sense of what fiction could do.

But my bestseller would inevitably be something I feel has been overlooked or ill-served by the marketplace in recent years. Maybe Jarett Kobek’s The Future Won’t Be Long, a knockout of a novel that sold (if Jarett’s own tabulation in his subsequent book is correct) fewer than five hundred copies, or a great, great book by Sam Sweet called Hadley Lee Lightcap, which is a wonderful, melancholy poem about Southern California geography masquerading as a book about a band most people have never heard of. Or—maybe it would be Don Carpenter’s Fridays at Enrico’s! That’s one of my favorite novels, by one of my favorite Bay Area writers. With apologies to both Balzac’s Lost Illusions and George Gissing’s New Grub Street, it’s also the single greatest book about the writing life I’ve ever encountered. Because it pays homage to a now vanished North Beach institution that was almost as venerable as City Lights, I’m gonna say that one.

5 Questions with Dana Spiotta, Author of Wayward

Dana Spiotta is the author of Innocents and Others, which won the St. Francis College Literary Prize and was short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Stone Arabia, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; Eat the Document, which was a National Book Award finalist; and Lightning Field. Spiotta was a Guggenheim Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and she won the 2008-9 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her the John Updike Prize in Literature. Spiotta lives in Syracuse and teaches in the Syracuse University MFA program. Her latest book is Wayward, a novel published by Knopf.

Dana Spiotta will be in conversation with Mona Awad, discussing Wayward,in our City Lights LIVE! virtual event series on July 8th!

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Where are you writing to us from?

Syracuse, NY.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

We have been watching movies based on themes, such as 70s New York, Neo Noir, or everything Paul Newman. Very diverting! Also watching some great series, like Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You.

What books are you reading right now?

I am rereading a collection of stories by Anthony Veasna So, called Afterparties. It comes out in a few weeks. It will knock your socks off. I am about to start Mona Awad’s All’s Well, which also comes out soon. Her last book, Bunny,was so smart, funny, dark.

Which books do you return to?

I love Moby-Dick. It is a monument to a certain kind of authorial madness, so it gives me inspiration.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

So many, but I will give you one very direct example. While writing Wayward, I watched the film My Happy Family. It’s about a middle-aged woman who leaves her family for no apparent reason. One scene in which she eats a piece of cake by herself really struck me, and so I put a similar cake moment in the book.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

That would be my dream job, truly. It would be in downtown Syracuse, which does not have an independent bookstore (although it has two excellent used bookstores). I have no idea about the name (City Lights is such a great name) or what the bestseller would be, but I think I would be good at handselling the books I love. And at making the case for them in capsule reviews. I would love to work in a well-curated bookstore.

5 Questions with Kate Zambreno, Author of To Write As If Already Dead

Kate Zambreno is the author of many acclaimed books, including Drifts (2020), Appendix Project (2019), Screen Tests (2019), Book of Mutter (2017), and Heroines (2012). Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and is the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Her newest book is To Write As If Already Dead, published by Columbia University Press.

Kate Zambreno will be in conversation with T Fleischmann about her new book in our City Lights LIVE! virtual event series on Wednesday, June 30th, 2021.

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Where are you writing to us from?

I’m writing to you from the first floor of the Victorian house we have rented in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, for nearly a decade. We haven’t left this entire year. I am on the couch at the end of a long day. There’s an early evening light coming in through the front window, my dog Genet is vigilantly expecting dinner, my four-year-old is tearing around outback, while her baby sister and her father watch.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

Going to Prospect Park regularly this year—even in January and February—and watching my daughter run around, and make mudpies, and make forts and strange tree sculptures by dragging around fallen branches, sticks, rocks, and logs.

What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?

I am writing the introduction to the Portuguese writer Maria Judite de Carvalho’s novel, Empty Wardrobes, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, and published by Two Lines Press, so I’m thinking through that work of interiority and domestic spaces and oppression and grief.

I just finished being in conversation with Cristina Rivera Garza at Sarah Lawrence College, where I teach, and a work that Rivera Garza kept mentioning in conversation with her newest essay collection Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (translated by Sarah Booker and published by Feminist Press) is Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press), so that’s up next.

I’m reading everything I can get my hands on about Eva Hesse, including the diaries, for a novel I’m writing, Foam, that thinks through different traumas and textures, including soft sculpture.

Speaking of Two Lines Press, I’ve been loving the work of Marie NDiaye in translation, specifically Self-Portrait in Green. I’ve also been returning frequently to works by Japanese women in translation, specifically, Yuko Tsushima, not only Territory of Light but also her stories, and Hiroko Oyamada’s novels, all published in translation by New Directions.

For a class I teach at Sarah Lawrence, on writing and elegy and the anthropocene, I’m reading Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press). Hedi El-Kholti, my editor at Semiotext(e) is sending me Peter Sloterdijik’s Spheres trilogy in the mail, because I need to read a book called Foams! And so I’m looking forward to that. I also am looking forward to reading Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door, and Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Borealis.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

The diptych structure of the book was inspired by reading Enrique Vila-Matas’s Because She Never Asked (published in translation by New Directions), which begins with the story written for the conceptual artist Sophie Calle to live out—the second half involves the Vila-Matas narrator writing the story. Vila-Matas is so ludic and conceptual and in love with literature and probably one of the writers that inspires me the most for the past two books (Drifts and the Guibert study). And Sophie Calle as well—the concept of a noirish or speculative essay like The Address Book—and in To Write As If Already Dead I think through Calle’s relationship with Hervé Guibert and how they fictionalized each other in their works. The photobooks of Moyra Davey, the relationship of her essays and diaristic works to her images, are incredibly important to me, like Burn the Diaries and Les Goddesses. Anne Carson, especially her talks and pieces collected in Float and her Short Talks. Bernhard and Sebald.

Of course, I should say the writing of Hervé Guibert, and that’s the right answer—the book in general was catalyzed by him, thinking through his whole project, the diary, the later illness works, his relationship to speed, to tone, to writing friendships. There’s also really interesting writing that’s channeling Guibert now—from Moyra Davey’s work, to Andrew Durbin’s novel Skyland, that Nightboat published.

So much of the first half of To Write As If Already Dead is a love letter to the community I formed online now a decade ago and whose writing I always feel in conversation with—my friends who are writers are often my favorite writers, and doing such tender and vital work, especially T. Fleischmann, who I’m delighted to be in conversation with at City Lights. I love them and their work and we have spoken to each other about Guibert for a while. Others like Sofia Samatar, and Danielle Dutton, who also runs Dorothy, a publishing project.

The book is dedicated to Bhanu Kapil, who I first met online a decade ago as we each wrote these unruly notebook projects on our blogs, and so much of the study feels like continuing the conversation we’ve been having the past few years, about how to write and survive under capitalism, on caretaking vs art. I think Bhanu is one of the most important and thrillingly playful and exciting writers alive.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

I think it would be on Cortelyou Road in Ditmas Park, as we don’t have a bookstore here. It would be called Finger and Thumb – when my partner John Vincler and I always spoke about having a bookstore that’s what we wanted to call it, it’s from Beckett and seems to gesture to the eroticism of actual print. I’m imagining we would sell artists’ books and chapbooks (like Sarah McCarry’s Guillotine series), art presses, presses like Semiotext(e) and Dorothy and Two Lines and Fitzcarraldo and Nightboat and New Directions and Transit Books. I think that our bestseller would be Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals, because it’s the book we often refer to amongst each other and urge on others to read, especially those interested in taking care in writing from research and archives, of what the archives have neglected, and the imaginative possibility of resurrecting the lives of others.

5 Questions for Laura Raicovich, Author of Culture Strike

Laura Raicovich was President and Executive Director of the Queens Museum. During her tenure, she was a champion of socially engaged art practices that address the most pressing social, political, and ecological issues of our times. She has defined her career with artist-driven projects and programs. She is the author of At the Lightning FieldandA Diary of Mysterious Difficulties. Her newest book is Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest published by Verso Books

Laura Raicovich will be discussing Culture Strike with special guest Malkia Devich-Cyril in our City Lights LIVE! virtual event series on June 17th, 2021.

*****

Where are you writing to us from?

I’m writing from Chelsea in New York City, my bedroom which is also my writing zone, and library. My windows overlooks the back of the former Chelsea YMCA, with its patterned brick and copper mansard roof, copper cornice, and eccentric histories. It’s a beauty to look at, and while I face mostly south, I get just enough western sky to see the weather coming in.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

I love to cook, so taking a break from the screen and planning and preparing lunches and dinners really kept me from going bonkers. Amidst the fear, it was comforting to cook for my husband and son, to make dishes from whatever was in the supermarket, especially in those early days when supplies were unpredictable, and to invent new ways to bring out the leftovers in salads and frittatas for lunch.

What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?

Right now I’m reading Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, and A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet, which are both outstanding in very different ways; and I recently finished Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening, which I am recommending to everyone. I’m also reading Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements by Charlene Carruthers which is essential reading right now.

I always go back to Rebecca Solnit’s writings as well as Saidiya Hartman’s books. Their ways of storytelling are very compelling to me, particularly as feminists and fighters. I guess I’d say they have an outsized influence on this book, as well as other of my writings. I admire them both immensely.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

See Above.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

I’d open a bookshop in a small town in Sicily called Modica. A great friend of mine named Corrado, who runs a small contemporary art gallery, lives there. I’d collaborate with him on making exhibitions and set up an anti-imperialist bookshop that has an A to Z arrangement of books from around the world. Art books would be unseparated from literature and philosophy, setting up wanderers to make connections that might not otherwise be stumbled upon between books. I love the chance encounter with a set of ideas that resonates through another, completely separate experience. It would be extraordinary to make a bookshop, and cultural space, that does the same.

5 Questions with Carol Anderson, Author of The Second

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University and author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation’s Divide, a New York TimesBestseller,Washington Post Notable Book of 2016, and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. She is also the author of Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955;Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960, and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy, which was long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Award in non-fiction.

Carol Anderson will be in conversation with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz discussing her newest book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (published by Bloomsbury) in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on June 9th, 2021!

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Where are you writing to us from?

A home office that has been my cocoon, my idea pod, and archeological dig given the mounds of paper. Afraid I’ll hit the magma if I dig down too deeply.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

You think I stayed sane? That’s cute. If there’s any semblance of sanity after the consistent killing of Black folks by police, the callousness and incompetence of governmental officials who’d rather score cultural warrior points over a mask and vaccine than save the lives of their citizens while a deadly disease stalks the globe, it was an odd combination of the pedantic and the urgent. Pedantic: the NYT Spelling Bee and crossword puzzles, Blue Bunny Double Fudge ice cream, and then, of course, followed by the absolute necessity of Nutrisystem. The urgent: answering the fierce urgency of now by weighing in on voting rights every chance I got.

What books are you reading right now?

Right now, I’m grading papers. I have stacked up some books that are beckoning me, Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, Rachel Maddow’s Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House, and Eddie Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.

Which books do you return to? Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest;Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles White, Robert Redbird, James Baldwin, David Levering Lewis, Elizabeth Hinton, John Dower, Adam Hochschild, Brenda Gayle Plummer.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

In a part of town where folks love to read and enjoy good music; Rhythm and Books (R&B); anything that Jesmyn Ward or Kiese Laymon wrote.

5 Questions with Chet'la Sebree, Author of Field Study

Chet'la Sebree is the director of the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts at Bucknell University and the author of Mistress, winner of the 2018 New Issues Poetry Prize and nominated for a 2020 NAACP Image Award. Her poetry has appeared in the Kenyon Review,Guernica,Pleiades, and elsewhere.

Chet'la will be in conversation with Dantiel W. Moniz, discussing her new book Field Study (published by FSG) in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on June 5th!

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Where are you writing to us from?

From my birth month of May.

From the left side of a rented duplex in central PA.

From the third floor in a patterned, blue-velvet armchair across from my teal-painted desk.

And, because I didn’t finish this all at once, from the first floor enjoying the afternoon sun.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

I want to be the kind of person who says exercise. I certainly spent some time on my mat and pounding the pavement, but it has really been food, wine, and fellowship that have held me together. These have always been the things that kept me sane. In grad school, I loved having people over for potluck dinners. But this sort of fellowship surrounding food took on new meaning in the pandemic. It wasn’t just that I learned how to make gluten-free pasta from scratch or placed orders for specialty wine shipments, but it was the sturdy calendar of happy hours and dinner dates kept me going. I did everything from virtual wine tastings to learning how to make injera with poet Diana Khoi Nguyen with home-ground teff to have boozy brunches and movie nights with friends from high school and college.

Right before the pandemic, I transitioned into a new job as a tenure-track professor and director of a university literary arts center and was traveling for my first book, Mistress, which meant sometimes I was in two different cities in one week, while also teaching classes and hosting events. This meant that I spent little time with my friends. Moving around less meant that I could not only reconnect but deepen relationships. Nearly every week since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve been meeting with prose writers Dantiel W. Moniz and María Isabel Álvarez—both of whom I’d met at a writing residency in 2017. Our first Zoom was an attempt to heal the wound of not seeing each other at a March 2020 conference. What started as a conversation, led to salons, led to work sessions, led to us planning for our own future residencies. We’ve cried; we’ve rooted each other on; we’ve held each other accountable. They kept me going through the last rounds of writing and editing Field Study, and I can’t wait to talk to Dantiel about it on June 5th!

What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?

Right now, I’m primarily reading emails and my students’ final portfolios, but I’m so excited for the pleasure reading this summer will bring. When I can sneak a moment, though, I am toggling between three books: Felicia Zamora’s newest collection I Always Carry My Bones; Nana Nkweti’s brand neew Walking on Cowrie Shells; and Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife. That last one is a reread; I first read the His Dark Materials series in high school. I often return to books I read in those pre-college years—fantasy and sci-fi novels like Ender’s Game but also Toni Morison’s The Bluest Eye, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I like thinking about who I’ve become since first reading them.

The book I would say I return to the most, however, is probably Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, or maybe even just specific essays in it: “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” and “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

I’m such a sponge, which is part of what made writing Field Study so fun. The patchwork style of quotes interwoven with my own language gave me a space to name names of those that influenced me. It gave me the chance to be in conversation with literary legends and thinkers like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Maya Angelou, while also calling on my brother, best friend, and cousin for insight.

I’m inspired by visual artists like Georgia O’Keefe, Nekisha Durrett, Alison Saar, Carrie Mae Weems, Stephanie J. Williams, and Deborah Willis, but I’m also inspired by theatre, films, dance, television. Who knows what Field Study would be if it weren’t for the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People that came out in April 2020. I am an early-to-bed person, but I finished watching the series at around 11:45pm, got out of bed, and worked on Field Study until 7am. Then, I slept for four hours, got up, and worked for the rest of the day. In watching that well-orchestrated chaos and intimacy, I was taken back to my early twenties, on which Field Study is loosely based. That’s how I work—something gets me in my guts, as poet E.G. Asher would say, and I find my way into the work. It could be a good show, Max Richter’s recomposed Vivaldi, or a nice food and wine paring that gets me going.

I also wrote to an erratic playlist that’s also representative of the diversity of conversations in Field Study. The music included everything from Foo Fighters and Paramore to Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill to Henryk Górecki and Sol Rising.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

My bookstore, URGE, would double as an integrative wellness center with a mind / body / spirit focus. We’re talking incenses and essential oils along with your book of the month picks. There’d be two locations: one on Whidbey Island, where I finished my first book Mistress,and laid the groundwork for Field Study; and the other in DC, which still calls to me even though I moved from the city seven years ago.

My bestsellers would be a tie between anything Audre Lorde (probably not surprising) and anything Bob’s Burgers-related, since my inner circle would know I got the name of the bookstore from the show’s Season 11’s Valentine’s episode: “Romancing the Beef.”

5 Questions with Aminatta Forna, author of The Window Seat

Aminatta Forna is the author of the novels Ancestor Stones,The Memory of Love, and The Hired Man, as well as the memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water. Forna’s books have been translated into twenty-two languages. Her essays have appeared in Granta,The Guardian,The Observer, and Vogue. She is currently the Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University.

Aminatta Forna will be in conversation with Eula Biss about her new book, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion (published by Grove), in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on Wednesday, May 19th, 2021!

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Where are you writing to us from?

I’m in Arlington, Virginia.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

A childhood spent in developing countries where things were often not as you would have wished: power cuts, curfews, coups. Dogs have always kept me sane and we had adopted a Blue Heeler a few months before the pandemic began. I have been running a good deal over the last twelve months and encouraged a friend to begin. Now she can run a 5K. I also go sculling on the Potomac. The outdoors, basically.

What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?

I’m reading Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which I am loving for Kimmerer’s intimate and yet authoritative voice. Fevers, Feuds and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History by Paul Farmer, which is about the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone and also blends history, memoir, and science. Also The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim, which I saw recommended by Rabih Alameddine on Twitter in a discussion about joyful novels. I found I was in the mood for a restorative Italian holiday.

I don’t return much to books, my natural curiosity tends to lead me to new books. Books I love and own in every form from E-book to signed first edition are A Heart So White by Javier Marías and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

This book: Pico Iyer, Annie Dillard, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Eula Biss. My wider influences: everything I have ever read.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

It would be in Freetown, Sierra Leone where we don’t have enough bookshops–the result of poverty and war. People in Sierra Leone love poetry. There are lots of good local poets and also excellent musicians who have won a national and regional following, such as Khady Black and Emmerson. Their hard hitting, political lyrics have propelled their very successful careers. Sierra Leone has a long history of political pamphleteering. I’d bet if someone ran off a few thousand copies of their song lyrics they’d sell in a day.

5 Questions with Kate Durbin, author of Hoarders

Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based writer and artist. Her books of poetry include E! Entertainment,The Ravenous Audience, and ABRA, which won the 2017 international Turn On Literature Prize. Durbin was the Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence in Brisbane, Australia in 2015. Her art and writing have been featured in the New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, The Believer,BOMB, poets.org, the American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She has shown her artwork nationally and internationally at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, The PULSE Art Fair in Miami, MOCA Los Angeles, the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in Los Angeles, peer to space in Berlin, and more.

Kate Durbin will be reading from her newest poetry book, Hoarders (published by Wave Books) with special guest Alex Dimitrov, also reading from new work, in our City Lights LIVE! virtual events series on Thursday, May 6th!

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Where are you writing to us from?

Los Angeles, California. I’m sitting at my writing desk with a bowl of Lucky Charms.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

I recently bought a View-Master from eBay, and I’ve been looking at all these beautiful old reels, of places like Yellowstone in the 60s, and miniatures of old Disney movies like Pinocchio. There’s something comforting about a little 3-D world inside a View-Master. It gives this feeling of a world continuing on, outside the frame, beyond your vision.

What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?

Right now I’m reading Carribean Fragoza’s Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, Kate Zambreno’s To Write As If Already Dead, Sam Cohen’s Sarahland, Henry Hoke’s The Groundhog Forever,Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979, Divya Victor’s Curb, and Ted Dodson’s An Orange.

I return to more books than I can list here! I’m a big re-reader. The most recent is Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms, which are beautiful, short, strange meditations on everyday objects and spaces. I have been thinking a lot about objects, how mysterious they really are. And their complicated relationships to people. This object-person question is a thread through my books E! Entertainment, Hoarders, and a novel I’m working on now about my childhood.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons was a big influence for my most recent book, Hoarders. Stein’s book is filled with slippery little objects with a language all their own. In Hoarders, the objects also have a kind of animism, or life to them, and a sense of humor too. For example, there’s a poem filled with surreal Barbies, that are real Barbies that have actually been made and marketed! Walk and Potty Pup Barbie, who comes with a tiny dog with nuggets of fake poop, Claude Monet Water Color Barbie, Tippi Hedren in The Birds Barbie, and many more.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

My bookstore would be located inside the Golden Nugget Casino in Las Vegas, somewhere near the shark slide. It would be called McDonald’s Chicken Nuggets, and our bestseller would be Jean Baudrillard’s America.

5 Questions with Michael Palmer, author of Little Elegies for Sister Satan

Michael Palmer is an American born in New York City in 1943 and long resident in San Francisco, nearly all of Palmer’s poetry is published by New Directions: At Passages(1995);The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972–1995(1998);The Promises of Glass(2000);Codes Appearing: Poems 1979–1988(2001);Company of Moths (2005); and most recently, Thread (2011). He is the translator of works by Emmanuel Hocquard, Vicente Huidobro, and Alexei Parshchikov, among others, and the editor of Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics. For over thirty years he has collaborated with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company.

His newest book of poems is Little Elegies for Sister Satan (also published by New Directions). Michael Palmer is reading from his new book, along with Erica Hunt (who is celebrating her new book of poems, Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems, published by Nightboat) in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on Tuesday, May 4th!

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Where are you writing to us from?

I am writing to you from a secret location not all that far from City Lights as the Dream Drone flies. In 1963, before I lived anywhere, Allen Ginsberg brought me to City Lights for the first time, where I purchased a copy of Michael McClure’s Dark Brown (Auerhahn Press), shelved then in the locked room among the works subject to possible criminal prosecution.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

I’d like to know who’s accusing me of being sane? I will be taking names.

What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?

As an act of self-abnegation, throughout the lockdown I have limited my reading (and rereading) to bestsellers. It seems that every day, I read at random from Wisława Szymborska’s collected and last poems, Map (translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak), as well as Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden (tr. Fady Joudah). I am finding my way back through Nate Mackey’s various prose and verse sequences, written across an illuminated lifetime. Of the several hundred other books of fiction, philosophy, writings on art, interviews, poetry, and social and political theory that I’ve begun, perused or read through during the lockdown, I have mostly fond if fading memories, like loves from an earlier life. Oh yes, and one day a week I’ve been reading aloud from The Decameron to friends in my pod. Yesterday we reached Day 8, Story 4.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

I am a magpie in this regard, stealing from my betters, living and gone, as I try in vain to listen to the Book of the World and record its echoes. And when I confront the artificial barriers, the walls, erected between nations by the corrupt and corrupting forces of power, I do my best to fly over them. From Szymborska’s “Psalm”:

Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!
How many clouds float past them with impunity;
how much desert sand shifts from one land to another;
how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil
in provocative hops!
Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers
or alights on the roadblock at the border?

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

Poets should never open bookstores, only patronize them as often as possible, while neglecting what others erroneously consider to be real life. It was in 1953 (I was ten) that Ferlinghetti came to me in a vision and asked whether he should invest in a bookstore with Peter Martin. I warned him in the most strenuous terms not to become involved, that it would be the ruin of him, and that nobody reads good books. And so it came to pass.

5 Questions with Kate Crawford, author of Atlas of AI

Kate Crawford is a leading scholar of the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor at USC Annenberg, a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, and the inaugural chair of AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

Katie Crawford will be discussing her new book, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (published by Yale University Press) with Trevor Paglen in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on Friday April 30th, presented with Gray Area!

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Where are you writing to us from?

Sydney, Australia. I normally live in New York, so visiting here is like being in a parallel universe where COVID-19 was taken seriously from the beginning and history played out differently.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

Cooking through every cookbook I own, talking to good friends, listening to records, and trying to improve my sub-par surfing skills.

What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?

Right now I’m reading Jer Thorp’s Living in Data: Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future, the excellent collection Your Computer is On Fire from the MIT Press, Kim Stanley Robinson’s TheMinistry for the Future, and The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. Yes, I have a problem - I never just read one book at a time.

In terms of books that I return to, there’s a long list. Here’s just a few: 

- Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star’s Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

- Ursula M. Franklin’s The Real World of Technology

- Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness

- James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

- Gray Brechin’s Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin

- Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower

- Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s Objectivity

- Oscar H. Gandy’s The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information. Critical Studies in Communication and in the Cultural Industries - such a prescient book about classification, discrimination and technology, published back in 1993!

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

Atlas of AI was influenced by so many writers and artists, across different centuries - from Georgius Agricola to Jorge Luis Borges to Margaret Mead. More recently, there’s been an extraordinary set of books published on the politics of technology in just the last five years. For example:

- Meredith Broussard’s Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World

-Ruha Benjmain’s Race After Technology

-Julie E. Cohen’s Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism

-Sasha Costanza-Chock’s Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need

-Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein’s Data Feminism

-Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

-Tarleton Gillespie’s Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media

- Sarah T Roberts’ Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media

- Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism

- Tung-Hui Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud

And that’s just for starters - it’s an incredible time for books that make us contend with the consequences of the technologies we use every day.

I’m also influenced by the artists I’ve had the privilege of working with over the years, including Trevor Paglen, Vladan Joler, and Heather Dewey-Hagborg. Vladan and I collaborated onAnatomy of an AI System a few years ago, and he designed the cover and illustrations in Atlas of AI, which I love.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

This may not be the most practical choice, but I’d open a library for rare and antiquarian books near Mono Lake. I’d call it Labyrinths, after Borges’ infinite library of volumes. One of its treasures would be a copy of John Wilkins’ An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668), where Wilkins tries to create a classification scheme for every possible thing and notion in the universe. It would be a cryptic joke for the occasional passer-by.

5 Questions with Mira Sethi, Author of Are You Enjoying?

Mira Sethi is an actor and a writer. She grew up in Lahore and attended Wellesley College, after which Sethi worked as a books editor at The Wall Street Journal. She has written op-ed pieces for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian. Sethi regularly appears in mainstream Pakistani drama series on television. She lives in Lahore, Karachi, and San Francisco.

Mira is celebrating her new book published Knopf, Are You Enjoying?, with special guest Miranda Popkey in our City Lights LIVE virtual event series on Thursday, April 22, at 6PM PT.

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Where are you writing to us from?

San Francisco.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

Tennis, my two pugs, lots of chai.

What are 3 books you always recommend to people?

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

I love the work of British novelist Alan Hollinghurst. He’s a superb noticer: of moods, faces, quivers, secret anticipations, the thwarting of said secret anticipations, the unspooling of a thought, things left unsaid, trees, skies, class dynamics. He’s also insanely funny.

I love the poetry of Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Faiz’s subjects were love, justice, revolution, and I read him to be rejuvenated.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

It would be in Lahore, it would be called Turn the Page, and our bestseller would be Faiz’s collected poetry.

5 Questions with Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Author of American Harvest

Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of a novel, Picking Bones from Ash, and a memoir, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award. She has written for the New York Times, Salon, National Geographic, Glamour, Ploughshares, and other publications and has been a guest on The World,Talk of the NationandAll Things Considered on NPR. She is a core faculty member of the Rainier Writing Workshop and a Visiting Writer in the MFA program Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California. She lives in San Francisco.

Mockett will be in conversation with Garnette Cadogan discussing her new book, American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland (published by Graywolf),in our City Lights Live! discussion series on April 21st at 6PM PT!

*****

Where are you writing to us from?

My childhood bedroom in Carmel by the Sea.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

Gardening and bird watching. The lilies I planted last spring have come up and it’s like greeting old friends. The cherries I planted survived winter and have started blooming and the whole garden is full of freesias, tulips, and daffodils. It’s impossible for me to feel sad looking at that intense color. Plants and birds tend not to be neurotic.

I’ve just invested in a fancy camera and started watching Youtube videos on how to take pictures of birds in flight. My friend Dan and I go out early in the morning looking for birds. That’s when no one else is around and the birds are waking up and looking for food and the most disarmed. It’s intense. It feels like we are hunting except no one dies.

I got electric scooters and my son and I ride into town to get pastries. I revived my WaniKani account–that’s a kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese) mnemonic app. I hadn’t used it since 2013 and had 1800 drills waiting for me. I cleared them and am moving on, learning vocabulary and new kanji. I can suddenly read in Japanese again. Some days I fantasize about doing a translation. I knit a lot of fair isle. It’s hard to find things on TV that the whole family wants to watch, but I can tell you that I have seen almost every episode of any kind of Star Trek show and Sherlock Holmes. I binge watched The Expanse and also watched a lot of historical documentaries.

What are 3 books do you always recommend to people?

I can’t really say that I do. It all depends on the person.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

The Bible. My early exposure to John Steinbeck. My parents. Pat Metheny. Brad Meldhau. Aaron Copeland. Albert Raboteau. My friend Orlando White. And as for my work generally … that’s tough.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

I tracked online auctions during the pandemic and became fascinated by Coco Chanel. Karl Lagerfeld, who designed Chanel for decades, did something called “metiers.” He would hold a fashion show in a different city around the world, and showcase the artisans who lived there. So for a Salzburg show, he included cloisonné cuckoo clock shaped earrings (I tried to bet on a pair, but lost). I think I would like to have the Karl Lagerfeld metiers bookstore that roamed the world in a similar fashion, showcasing the writers who live in each city. There would be no bestseller. Such a thing would be outré and unnecessary.  Maybe the entire enterprise could be funded by specially designed tote bags. I hear that’s how The Strand makes most of its money.

I suppose it might be nice to have a bookstore in downtown Carmel again. When I was growing up there were two, and now there are none, though we are fortunate to still have River Run Books, an excellent independent bookstore, in the Crossroads.

5 Questions with Courttia Newland, Author of A River Called Time

Courttia Newland is the author of seven books including his much-lauded debut, The Scholar. His last novel, The Gospel According to Cane, was published by Akashic in 2013. In 2016 he was awarded the Roland Rees Bursary for playwriting. As a screenwriter, he has co-written two episodes of the Steve McQueen BBC series Small Axe.A River Called Time is his latest book.

Courttia Newland will be discussing his newest book with Naomi Jackson and Victor LaValle as part of our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on April 17th!

*****

Where are you writing to us from?

I’m writing from Forest Gate, East London in the borough of Newham, which is the birthplace of Grime and Jungle, home of the 2012 Olympics; and it has a pretty cool park near me too–West Ham Park. I’ve only lived here for eight years or so; before that I was in Brixton, and before that I was born and bred in west London: Wood Lane, Shepherd’s Bush, and Ladbroke Grove. There’s a rumor that Brixton and Ladbroke Grove are twinned, as far as the African-Caribbean populace are concerned. The only part of London I’ve never lived in is north. So far.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

Being a writer I’m usually holed up in the house for the better part of a year anyway, and I was doing pretty good until January. Then I had enough. I’ve been working mostly, getting projects done, overdosing on music, watching as much film and TV as I can, reading on occasion. SAULT albums were a Godsend; I love prolific artists. The movies Rocks,His House,Time, and I’m No Longer Here were really inspiring. I binged on Watchmen,The Morning Show andHomecoming. I also don’t know what I’d have done without my family and kids being with me.

What are 3 books do you always recommend to people?

Only 3?! Percival Everett - Erasure, Curdella Forbes – A Tall History of Sugar, Colson Whitehead – The Intuitionist.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

Well, Percival heavily influences me, so much so that my previous novel was homage to his work. As I love prolific artists, J Dilla is a major inspiration for his ability to find his own lane, and work without the need for outside accolades. Erykah Badu, Alice Coltrane, Flying Lotus, Kendrick Lamar, Kool G Rap. Steve McQueen without question. Dennis Brown, Peter Tosh, Dennis Bovell, Smiley Culture. Fela Kuti, James Brown. The Grime scene, Wiley, Dizzee, D Double E, Kano, the UK Hip-Hop scene (shout out to London Posse, and Demon Boyz)! The entire diaspora sound-system culture! Boards of Canada, Autechre. The Metu Neter. God. Everything really.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

Shepherd’s Bush Green, it’d be called House of Culture and it would be fully interactive with a coffee shop/juice bar, theatre/cinema which could be turned into a space for book launches and parties. Perhaps a writing/internet space for people without access, kind of like an Internet bar or library. Strictly A to Z by author, no sections according to ethnicity. African Diaspora led, but completely inclusive. I’d never dictate the bestseller! It could be anything really but something smart and incisive about life, sex, spirituality and the capacity for human potential that could be anything: fiction, non-fiction, a play or poetry. Something mind-bending and true that exists without hype, just pure joy.

4 Questions with Hoa Nguyen, Author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

Born in the Mekong Delta, Hoa Nguyen was raised and educated in the United States and has lived in Canada since 2011. She is the author of several books including As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice, Violet Energy Ingots, andA Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure which is new from Wave Books in April 2021. She has served as guest editor for The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2018 and as a judge for the 2020 Griffin Prize. Her writing has garnered attention from such outlets as PBS News Hour, Granta, The Walrus, New York Times, and Poetry, among others.

Hoa is celebrating her new book, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure on City Lights LIVE!, joined by Garrett Caples, on Tuesday, April 6th, 2021.

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City Lights: Where are you writing to us from?

Hoa Nguyen: I write to you from Toronto, the traditional territory of the Wendat, the Anishnaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Métis, and the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation in the Dish With One Spoon Territory.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

Poetry and my friendships, family. The love in my home; the love of my Dale.

What are 3 books you always recommend to people?

John Lemprière’s The Bibliotheca Classica, or Classical Dictionary containing a full Account of all the Proper Names mentioned in Ancient Authors.

The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon.

A Guide to the I Ching by Carol K. Anthony or the collaborative translation of the I Ching by Anthony with Hannah Moog where they use a “clarifying method” to assist in that work.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

Singer-songwriter traditions and folk song. Story as song in verse was something specifically that compelled me. An early musical lesson was from listening to Johnny Cash’s “John Henry” and “Folsom Prison Blues” next to Vietnamese folk songs on a reel-to reel. The poems’ narrative form in my new book is lyric that strays into fractures, checks out archive, and seeks musical reference—the orientation remains musical.

Another influence was Joanne Kyger’s work with biography in verse and her proposal of finding the lost tones of the poetry stone, specifically. A mythic orientation whereby you can render the actors of another era palpable and present. Along with that there was the experience studying Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee in a mythopoetics workshop (where we also read Kyger’s On Time and Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette). Thinking about how poems can address time; how to tell / retell and shape story, new relationships to meaning making, world making.

I was thinking through what it means “to document” to relate from memory. I was also looking into the history of Vietnamese music, especially the monochord of Vietnam, the đàn bầu. The music the bent string produces sounds like a voice and is distinct to the southern Mekong delta region, influenced by the Cham. The notes blur and bend in similar progressions as Mississippi delta blues and the slide guitar, too, has shared voice-like qualities.

One of our booksellers, Caitlyn Wild, had the amazing opportunity to conduct this longform interview with author Sheree Renée Thomas. Her newest book is Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future, published by Third Man Books. Sheree is celebrating her book along with her Third Man “label mates” Alison Mosshart and Robert Gordon (who also have new books out) in our City Lights LIVE events series on Wednesday, October 21.

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Caitlyn: This book is gorgeous on the inside AND the outside. This is one of my favorite covers of 2020, have to say. As I’m gazing wistfully at it here I see the subtitle, “Stories from an Ancient Future”. Could you speak about what that phrase holds and conjures for you?

Sheree Renée Thomas: Thank you! I wanted the cover for Nine Bar Blues to offer a visual clue to some of the characters, natural (and unnatural) landscapes, and themes in the stories. Third Man Books did a wonderful job of creating that sense of wonder and the verdant richness (cicadas, Egyptian gods, the moon, aliens, vines!) I was hoping for. 

The subtitle, “Stories from an Ancient Future” is my riff on the idea that if humanity continues onward, we’ll someday reach a point where even our imagined futures are ancient. Some of the stories in the collection are set in the near future, alternate futures, the present, and the past. What would life be like if you existed in an ancient future? If time is relative, there is always a place where we can look back at ourselves (or our imagined selves) and see the grand sweep of time. What things remains the same, what falls away, is erased and remade again? The ancient future contains some of the wisdom of our past and some of our hopes for the future. It also contains our mistakes and fears. Will we be better off then, in this imagined future? Perhaps, at least I hope so. But that depends on what we carry with us and how well we learn from the lessons of the past. For me, it’s a blending of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles and the West African philosophy of Sankofa. 

The story that really stayed with me in this collection was “Head Static”. It put me in an altered state! I felt like I was watching the earth as it was being created, the deep gods and archetypes of our psyches emerging from the hum of the universe before my eyes, but in reverse. In short, I loved it! Could you tell us about the inception of the character in that story, Claire, and explain how she came to be in your mind and then on the page?

That makes me so happy because Claire was one of those characters whose journey really haunted me. When I began writing her, I knew who she was but not whyshe was, or rather, how she had come to feel the way she did. Music became a way of thinking about the things that people share in common, around the world, throughout time. It is one of our greatest forms of expression. And music contains our deepest thoughts and observations on the world. But our culture is so obsessed with the cult of celebrity, in search of the next great thing. We worship youth and novelty, often at youth’s expense. There’s this constant drive for innovation and acceleration, while holding onto the dream of an endless life span. At what cost? To what end? Writing “Head Static” was a way for me to think about some of these ideas while exploring that deep musical connection.

On October 21 we are excited to host you and two of your fellow Third Man Books authors, Alison Mosshart and Robert Gordon. Third Man also publishes another of my favorites, Janaka Stucky. As a reader I’m consistently enraptured with the authors and books they publish. I’m curious as to what the Third Man experience is like from the author’s side?

It’s been pretty exciting! First of all, if you ever get a chance to visit Third Man Records, go immediately because the space is just amazing. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like a cross between Tim Burton and Ed Wood with a little Willy Wonka mixed in there? Fantastic design throughout and um, Jack White. Yeah, Jack White! Working with Chet Weise and the Third Man Books/Records team has been as close as my non-musical self has ever been to being in a rock band! There is a lot of good energy, great ideas, and collaboration, and the team is insanely supportive and creative. Between the kickass writers—poets, fiction writers, creative nonfiction—there’s a great deal of talent to just vibe with and connect. My fellow press mates are always working on new wonders, the kind of work that impacts the world—and that’s inspiring.

You are the first Black author to receive a World Fantasy Award for the groundbreaking collection you edited, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, which was published in 2000. (HELL YES). In another interview, you said you were inspired to put the book together because you were shocked it didn’t exist yet. In 2020, is there a book you are shocked that has yet to be published? What books that have come along since 2001 are you glad about?

There is at least one marvelous book that I do hope to see in the world before I roll out, and there are a couple of others that seem like their time has come, industry-wise, so we shall see. Back in ’98 when I was thinking on what would eventually become the first volume of Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, I didn’t set out to create a groundbreaking project. I literally was just looking for more Black speculative fiction to read for fun, and when I didn’t find it in the bookstores, its absence puzzled me. With as many different anthologies that make up the genre, I was surprised that it hadn’t been done before. I’m really grateful I had the chance (and the courage) to do it. It’s been quite a journey!

Since that first volume and the second one, Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, that came out in 2004, there have been many, many wonderful amazing books that pretty much put away the old arguments about Black writers not reading or writing this work. One book that I reviewed around the time I was working on the anthology was Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring. That novel felt like a game changer to me, because Nalo’s writing got us all so excited about the cultures and worlds we had not seen often in science fiction. She achieved this in a magical way that, while offering all the things we love about speculative fiction, rang true with a rootedness in Afrodiasporic culture. It didn’t feel like she was translating to us. Her writing, storytelling, and world building felt natural and true to itself. Today you could have a whole library of Black speculative fiction (and the scholarship that examines it), and that is beyond thrilling for me.

 Between the diverse works of N.K. Jemisin, Andrea Hairston, Tananarive Due, P. Djèlí Clark—they cover a lot of imaginative ground–and a ton of exciting YA authors I cannot even begin to name, readers have a lot of new work and new voices to explore. It’s just an exciting time.

Finally, if you owned a bookstore or small press, what would it be called and what would your bestseller or focus be?

I’ve been jotting down bookstore names for years! Here are a few: 

Beloved Books (this was invented during my Toni Morrison phase), focusing on the books people can’t stop discussing and all of our childhood favorites, too. 

Echo Tree Books (named after one of my favorite short story writers and poets, Henry Dumas, featuring all fantasy, science fiction, horror, and such).

Haint Blue Books (so I can paint every single wall the most stunning shades of blue, focusing on excellent fiction and world folklore with tons of poetry because sometimes, sadly, people be sleeping on the poetry, lol. Don’t sleep on the poets!). 

And my favorite, All Y’all Books (Southern lit and more! Plus a healthy selection of regional lit from other parts). 

I love the last one the best because I can just hear folks saying, “You know you can get it at All Y’all Books!” or asking, “Where did you get that?” “Girl, at All Y’all’s Books. They have out of print and rare books, too!”  Authors can say, “I’m going to be reading at All Y’all’s Books.” You can’t help but smile when you say that!