All Interviews

Science Fiction & Fantasy Science Fiction

Lauren Beukes embraces the multiverse

When 24-year-old Bridge arrives in Portland, Oregon, to sort through her mother’s belongings after her untimely death, she discovers a magical artifact in the back of the freezer. The “dreamworm,” as her mother, Jo, referred to it, is the key to traveling between alternate realities, and Jo’s seemingly delusional quest to find it defined Bridge’s chaotic childhood. After eating the dreamworm, Bridge embarks on a universe-hopping journey to understand what really happened to her mother. We talked to author Lauren Beukes about the allure of the multiverse and what she’s learned about herself since publishing The Shining Girls.

I love the idea of the dreamworm. How did you come up with the idea?
Oh god, it’s the last decade(s) of turmoil in the world, the realization that we all live in completely separate and conflicting realities that feel true to us. I’ve been horrified by the tip towards fascism and far right politics of hate, anti-vaxxers and anti-trans legislation, the reversal of abortion rights, shareholders’ profits-over-all, climate-change deniers. So, we already live in different dimensions to each other.

Also, psychedelic experiences like Dreamachine in London, which was hallucinatory without any additives except light and music, my lifelong love of Narnia and that simplest and most profound act of reading, which transports you into other worlds and other lives.

What about it appealed to you as a writer?
It’s the appeal of the road not taken, all the might have beens in your life and the choices you didn’t make. How useful would that be, to be able to audition other versions of you, correct your mistakes, learn from your successes?

This is a (mostly) plausible alternate reality story in that all the universes are compatible with ours, similar enough that it’s easy to slip between the other lives and other versions of you. There are no Spider-Hams or sausage fingers, for example, to shout out those other two perfect multiverse stories of late.

“We already live in different dimensions to each other.”

This book required a fair amount of neuroscience knowledge. What was that research process like?
The research is the best part of writing for me! Any excuse to hang out with interesting people and pick their brains and have them geek out about their specialties, including Cape Town, South Africa, neurosurgeon Dr. Sally Rothemeyer who talked me through epilepsy and tumors and my friend Dr. Hayley Tomes, who lent her name to the fictional disease Tomesians. The chapter set in the neuroscience lab is based on my visit to Hayley’s lab, and I couldn’t resist including all the good science and weird trivia. I did pick up excellent facts, but my favorite thing to come out of this was a physical memento.

After spending half a day with Hayley looking at slices of rat brain and mushed-up tapeworm larva under the confocal microscope, she asked me if I wanted a piece of rat brain to take home. I said, “Obviously!” I keep it in my 1930s medical cabinet with other writing mementos like the vintage My Little Pony from The Shining Girls, the Zoo City-inspired sloth scarf I wore to the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the cheap “satanic” jewelry I was gifted by Detective “Auntie Ghostbuster” from South Africa’s Occult Crimes Unit. My rat brain slice looks like a tiny piece of dried snot on a glass slide in a plastic case. Naturally, I named it Pinky.

The characters in Bridge have an impressively realistic balance of admirable qualities and concerning flaws. Did you have any core inspirations for Bridge and Jo? Did one come into focus earlier than the other?
Bridge is a departure from most of my protagonists, because she’s so uncertain, so adrift in her life. Part of that is in reaction to growing up with Jo and Jo’s obsession with a reality-switching artifact, partly it’s being young in the 2020s in a world that feels very chaotic and scary right now. She’s trying to come to terms with her mother’s death, that the weirdness of her childhood was maybe real, not one of Jo’s delusions, and who the hell she’s supposed to be. She’s always been paralyzed by choice, but the situation she’s catapulted into is going to force her to make some really big ones.

Jo was easier to write because she’s dead set on what she wants, but that single-mindedness exploring other realities has cost her a lot in this one, including her relationship with her daughter.

It’s been 10 years since you wrote The Shining Girls. What have you learned about your writing along the way?
This is a big one. In the last year, I got my adult ADHD diagnosis! Which explains why I’m probably never going to write a sequel (because it’s not shiny and new), the magpie nature of my novels, the weird places my research takes me and how it all comes together—and also why there were five years between Broken Monsters and Afterland.

Post-divorce in 2014, I was, like Bridge, lost, thrashing around, unable to settle on one thing, paralyzed by choices: wheel-spinning in the parking lot on the motorcycle of doubt. To be fair, I was also rebuilding my life from scratch, and I wrote two graphic novels and put together a short story collection in that time. But it turns out big life changes like divorce can throw people who have coped with their ADHD all their lives.

Since I’ve started medication and all the good lifestyle things around sleep and exercise and eating well, my depression and anxiety are basically gone and writing is a joy again. Still tricky, still sometimes like wading knee-deep through taffy swamplands, but doable. I think a lot of that experience is reflected in who Bridge is as a character, just as the creators of Everything Everywhere All at Once have talked about it as an ADHD allegory.

I don’t know if I’ve learned anything new about writing. Rather, I’ve come back to something I always knew: the most important thing is to finish the work and allow yourself to be messy and rough in the first draft. Stop wheel-spinning, stop doubling back, stop wondering if you should have taken the other exit. There’s a profane South Africanism that works here. Vokvoert. Literally fuck-forward, but really, fuck it, do it, go.

“Stop wheel-spinning, stop doubling back, stop wondering if you should have taken the other exit.”

You’ve written several serial killer mysteries and, without spoiling too much, there are some measured and practical, yet still quite violent scenes in Bridge. What attracts you to these scenes and/or characters? Why is violence such a compelling artistic subject?
I grew up in apartheid South Africa, an incredibly violent society, and I’ve seen the repercussions of that kind of ruthless repression: the deep, historical, systemic issues that can’t be magically undone with a democratic election, even almost 30 years later, even with one of the best constitutions in the world. It’s the air we breathe, filled with knives. South Africa has the highest wealth inequality in the world and one of the highest rates of gender-based violence, especially against women of color and even more so if they’re queer or trans. That goes back centuries, to colonialism, to the slave trade and capitalism and the channels of power. Violence—personal, systemic—has shaped the world. It always will.

The people who perpetrate violence will always find ways to justify it to themselves, as the antagonist does in Bridge. I’m interested in those moral contortions, in what violence is and what it does to us, the choices we make.

What are some of your favorite pieces of media you experience this last year?
There has been so much incredible TV, from season two of “The White Lotus” to the gleeful genre-mashup mystery of “The Afterparty.” “Better Call Saul,” “Barry,” and “Succession” were perfect and I may be slightly biased here, but I thought “Shining Girls” was such a smart, beautiful, thoughtful adaptation by showrunner Silka Luisa that was true to the bloody heart of my book. But the best thing I saw this year was “Search Party.” It’s such a weird wonderful show that gets progressively more batshit but absolutely consistent with the characters. (Of course, of course, that is where they would end up.)

Movies: Everything Everywhere All at Once (natch), Triangle of Sadness, Men.

Books: Nick Harkaway’s plutocrat mutant murder, Titanium Noir; Catriona Ward’s meta mystery puzzle box, Looking Glass Sound; Lisa Taddeo’s remarkable Three Women; two books by dear friends (again, slightly biased)—Sam Beckbessinger and Dale Halvorsen’s ’90s riot-grrrl small-town horror, Girls of Little Hope which wears its bloody heart safety-pinned to its teen punk T-shirt and Sam Wilson’s The First Murder on Mars, a fast and sharp sci-fi thriller. Oh, and Louie Stowell’s third middle grade Loki book, which she wrote and illustrated, is my favorite take on that excellent trickster (just like Lego Batman is the definitive Batman in my universe).

Read our review of ‘Bridge’ by Lauren Beukes.

What’s your favorite way to work?
I rent a studio space with a bunch of illustrators, animators, designers, filmmakers and writers in the hip East London neighborhood of Dalston. Writing is such lonely, in-your-head work it’s really important to me to have other people around and specifically other artists. It’s really social, but also focused and it means I can separate work and home, keep normal hours and get lots of freewheeling thinking time as I cycle in.

If you could pick one author from the past or present to have tea with, who would it be?
I’m lucky to have a lot of author friends and I’d jump at any chance to spend more time with them. But among people I don’t know personally: Atwood, for her words, her insight, her curious mischief.

What’s next for you?
I have an original TV show in development with two of my closest friends, Sam Beckbessinger and Dale Halvorsen (I did say I was slightly biased above) and I’ve just started germinating a new novel, but what I’d really love to do is write an immersive theater project. I was blown away by Swamp Motel’s Saint Jude where you’re assigned to help guide a coma patient through their memories, and Phantom Peak, which is Punch Drunk-meets-“Westworld” with less sex and murder and more cosmic platypuses.

Photo of Lauren Beukes by Peter Kindersley.

The author of The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters returns with Bridge, a thriller that’s trippy in more ways than one.

Fiction Family Drama

How novels changed Etaf Rum’s life

Etaf Rum barely remembers the exchange, but as a child, she apparently used to jokingly threaten to write a novel about her mother. At least that’s what her sisters tell her, and as the oldest of nine children of Palestinian immigrants living in Brooklyn, Rum no doubt had plenty of family stories to tell. “I was an avid reader,” she says, “and I think that storytelling came to me as second nature.”

Despite these early inclinations, the wild success of Rum’s novel, A Woman Is No Man (2019), is still astounding. For readers, Rum seemed to appear out of nowhere, like a meteor lighting up the sky. “To think that I penned a New York Times bestselling novel with no experience—even talking to you now, it still blows my mind,” Rum says, speaking by phone from Rocky Mount, North Carolina. A Woman Is No Man chronicles several generations of Palestinian American women, all of whom are forced to marry a man of their family’s choosing, live by his and his family’s rules, and undergo verbal and physical abuse—until one young woman finds a way to break the cycle.

“Women, regardless of their race and ethnicity, have identified with these characters—whether in themselves or their mothers or their sisters or their aunts—and have reached out to tell me how much the book has transformed them.”

“I thought I was writing a story for underrepresented Arab women,” Rum says, “[but] the story has touched women across cultures. The universality of the message has stunned me. Women, regardless of their race and ethnicity, have identified with these characters—whether in themselves or their mothers or their sisters or their aunts—and have reached out to tell me how much the book has transformed them.”

These readers have been eagerly awaiting Rum’s second novel, Evil Eye, which begins with mention of a family curse. Protagonist Yara’s grandmother peers into leftover Turkish coffee grounds to read the fortune of her daughter, Meriem, who is about to marry and immigrate to the United States. The novel then flashes forward several decades, to when Yara is experiencing serious job trouble while teaching at a North Carolina college, and Meriem suggests that this predicament is a continuation of the old curse. It’s an opening scene reminiscent of Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists, and it sets the stage for the way fear, curses and superstition permeate Yara’s story.

“Fear that something bad will happen, that you have to worry about someone or something robbing you of that goodness—it’s such a human trait,” Rum says, noting that this is the root of habits like knocking on wood or hanging an evil eye at an entrance. On a recent trip to Greece, she was amazed by the number of evil eyes she saw. “When I say they were everywhere,” she says, “I mean everywhere. Like every store. I thought it was an Arab thing, but I think the Greeks have definitely won this one.”

“Because my caregivers are still traumatized, they raised me in that trauma.”

In many ways, Evil Eye is a continuation of A Woman Is No Man, although the writing processes were vastly different. The plot of Rum’s debut came “in a flash” as a result of processing “repressed emotions” with therapy and journaling. “Instantaneously, overnight it seemed, I wanted to write a novel,” she says. “I had this urge to write about the Arab American experience, or at least one aspect of it. I drew very heavily on my own upbringing and my own experiences as a Palestinian woman. I had to capture these feelings and maybe make someone feel seen.”

Not only did Rum write quickly, but the novel was also published quickly, making the whole experience feel like a “miracle” and leaving her with a startling revelation: “Up until that point, I was living a life that I thought was of my own choosing, but really wasn’t,” she says. “I think I went through a sort of awakening. I found my voice, and I found out who I was.” As a result, she ended up divorcing her husband, much to her family’s shock and dismay. “I cannot want courage and freedom and bravery for these characters and yet, in my own life, be living in this sort of denial,” she says.

There were repercussions, of course, including a long period of estrangement from her family. As a result, writing her second novel was a struggle—“the opposite of a flash”—but she once again called upon her own experiences. Yara resembles Rum in many ways: Both grew up in Brooklyn, married young and moved to North Carolina. Both have two children and taught college courses, and both felt trapped in their marriages, especially by the expectations placed on them as Palestinian American wives. Like Rum, in Evil Eye, Yara becomes increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage and begins to journal about her life at the urging of her therapist, which helps her chart a new course.

Ironically, Rum did not want her second novel to be autobiographical, but she soon realized, “I’m a sheltered artist who grew up in a sheltered world, so I can’t escape the fact that some of the novel is autobiographical.” Like Yara, Rum grew up with highly protective parents and was given none of the freedoms that the men in her family enjoyed.

“Their future is so uncertain,” she says of her Palestinian family. “And even though they live in America, that trauma is still there for my mom and dad; it’s present with them every day. They conduct their life out of fear and wanting to protect their family. Because my caregivers are still traumatized, they raised me in that trauma. That feeling of displacement—it’s even more than that, because it’s almost as if you’re actually displaced from your own body. You’re constantly running, you’re constantly searching, you’re constantly trying to improve. And I think that’s inherited and acquired. Even now, as a mother of my own kids, I sometimes catch myself and say, ‘Relax. No one’s coming to hurt you or to take away your home.’ But how do you relax when you’re raised on fear?”

In Evil Eye, the author notes similarities between Arab culture and life in the American South, “a place [Yara knows] about only from her favorite southern writers: Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison. From their books she’d gathered that southern culture was not so unlike her own: full of loud and large close-knit families where women married young and had many children, focused on conservative values with an emphasis on religion or tradition, with an adherence to recipes that were passed down through generations. Even the obsession with tea at every possible social gathering—though southerners preferred it iced while Arabs served it boiling—felt like a point of connection. The similarities filled her with both comfort and dread.” Indeed, a simmering culture clash becomes a flashpoint in the novel when a colleague makes an offensive remark, causing Yara to explode in a way that has serious career consequences.

While depicting her culture in fiction, Rum remains wary of perpetuating stereotypes, especially because there are so few American writers of Arab or Palestinian descent. “Unfortunately, my stories are very dark, and that just happens to coincide with the world I come from. I’m sure there are many Palestinian communities and families that do not live in such a stereotypical world. I wish I could write about those worlds, but I’m not there yet.”

After initially feeling like an outsider when she moved to North Carolina, Rum has now established a robust sense of community. She has remarried, and she and her husband own both a pizza shop and a coffee shop called Books and Beans. “Now I feel like this place is home,” she says. As for her next project, she’s ready for a change of pace and is considering a screenplay or a children’s book. “There are a lot of ideas popping up in my head,” she says, “but I think that the literary adult trauma novels are for now complete.”

Read our review of Evil Eye.

Author photo by Angela Blankenship.

Bestselling Palestinian American author Etaf Rum was utterly transformed by the characters in her debut, A Woman Is No Man. With her second novel, she begins to process the aftermath.

Children's & YA Middle Grade Children's

Grace Lin examines one of America’s favorite cuisines

Writer and illustrator Grace Lin loves to order takeout Chinese food but confesses she’s not a whiz when it comes to chopsticks. Speaking by phone from her home in Northampton, Massachusetts, she laughingly explains: “I can get the food to my mouth, but you’re supposed to hold one like a pencil, and just one chopstick is supposed to move. When I do it, both chopsticks move. It’s definitely not the correct way, but it works.”

Lin’s latest creation, Chinese Menu: The History, Myths, and Legends Behind Your Favorite Food, will make readers’ mouths water regardless of their chopstick skills. It’s a project she has been contemplating since 2004 but wasn’t ready to tackle until recently. Beautifully illustrated by Lin—who has won both the Caldecott and the Newbery—Chinese Menu features 40 or so stories about the legends and history behind popular American Chinese foods—everything from egg rolls and wonton soup to General Tso’s Chicken and fortune cookies.

“In my circles, it seems like people know lo mein just as well as a hot dog, you know? Working on this book has really shifted my idea of what American food is.”

“I spent most of my childhood trying to pretend that I wasn’t Asian,” Lin says, reminiscing about growing up in Utica, New York, where few Asian families lived at the time. “The two tenuous connections I had to my heritage were reading Chinese folktales and legends that my mom snuck me and the food that we ate every day. So those were the two ways that my culture was passed on to me as a child. I guess that’s why I use them so often in my books, because they were the only roots that I felt I had. I’ve been strengthening them over time.”

Even though her very first books—The Ugly Vegetables (1999) and Dim Sum for Everyone (2001)—were about Chinese food, she says, “I think for years I almost felt like I was faking it. That I look Asian on the outside, but didn’t really feel Asian on the inside. It’s really through doing all these books that I finally feel like I can claim that part of my identity.”

Her first editor advised her to write a book featuring a white character to avoid being pigeonholed as a “multicultural author and illustrator.” She didn’t take his advice. “Back then, that was a burden,” she muses. “Now I take it as a badge of honor.” Throughout a career that has spanned over two decades, Lin has created board books, picture books, early readers and children’s novels featuring Asian and Asian American characters. Several novels (Year of the Dog, Year of the Rat and Dumpling Days) are based on her own life as the child of parents who grew up in Taiwan while it was still called the Nationalist Republic of China.

Lin has come a long way since those early days of self-doubt. In 2022, the American Library Association awarded her the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. As for Chinese Menu, she says, “This book is not me claiming that part of my identity. This book is not to prove to myself or to others that I’m Asian enough or American enough. This book is a celebration to show the world how wonderful that identity is. It’s something with a lot of richness, joy and wonder, and that’s enjoyable for everyone, because it’s food.”

Read our starred review of Chinese Menu.

Over the years, Lin had filed away numerous Chinese restaurant menus that she found interesting, and she would occasionally discuss the project as a possibility with her current editor (who happens to be a best friend she met in fifth grade). During COVID-19 lockdowns, incidents of anti-Asian prejudice and violence increased, and Lin felt compelled to tackle this book. “It seemed like an opportune time to celebrate being Asian American,” she says. She dove into her boxes of material and hired a research assistant, Izabelle Brande from the Department of East Asian Languages and Culture at Smith College. Lin doesn’t read Chinese, but Brande provided her with translations of many secondary sources. “I had a lot of stories via word of mouth from my parents and relatives,” Lin recalls. “I would know one version of a story, and [Brande] was really amazing because she would tell me that there are actually three versions.”

“I absolutely adore myths, legends and folk tales, as you can tell from all of my work,” she continues. “But one of the things that I really wanted to do with this book was to show how these stories are still part of our culture today. What’s more tangible and easier to understand than the food that we eat?”

“This book is not to prove to myself or to others that I’m Asian enough or American enough. This book is a celebration to show the world how wonderful that identity is. It’s something with a lot of richness, joy and wonder, and that’s enjoyable for everyone, because it’s food.”

Lin not only wrote Chinese Menu, but also illustrated it, using her tween daughter and her daughter’s friend as models. Being both an illustrator and writer allows Lin to make adjustments in both pictures and prose as she goes—for instance, shortening text that she realizes is shown in the art—even up until the last minute. Chinese Menu is unusual because it’s the first time Lin has illustrated digitally. For the cover and the present-day food pictures, she painted with gouache by hand—her usual way—but to illustrate the traditional stories, she scanned initial drawings and colored them digitally in a limited color palette.

“I wanted to separate the folktales from present-day life,” she says. Lin is happy with the results, but it took a toll physically—she moved around less at the computer and became sore from being in the same position for hours. Nonetheless, she says, “I often dream about doing a graphic novel, and I realize now that the only way I would ever be able to do that is to embrace digital media.”

Lin encountered a few surprises as she worked. First, she hoped to find a good story about soy sauce but found nothing—“just stuff about trying to make food salty without using so much salt. It was all really boring.” One discovery that delighted her, however, was the realization of how important American Chinese food is to American culture: “It’s become integrated into our lives just as much as hamburgers and pizza. In my circles, it seems like people know lo mein just as well as a hot dog, you know? Working on this book has really shifted my idea of what American food is.”

Her book includes just one recipe, for her mother’s scallion pancakes. “It’s called Chinese Menu because it’s about food that you order at a restaurant,” Lin says with a laugh. “I don’t mind cooking, but I would rather read a book!”

The increase in incidents of anti-Asian violence during COVID-19 compelled award-winning writer and illustrator Grace Lin to compile this mouthwatering tribute to American Chinese foods.

Nonfiction Sports Lifestyles Fashion

‘Fly’ is Mitchell S. Jackson’s flashy foray into NBA fashion history

In his stunning, sharp new book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Mitchell S. Jackson delves into the wide world of NBA fashion. Fly is a pictorial and cultural history of the major influence that basketball stars have had on style.

Tell us more about your fascination with and connection to fashion. Did your love of fashion or your love of the NBA come first?
I’ve loved fashion since I was a little kid. I guess it began with my mother dressing me up, but soon enough, I had my own opinion about what I should wear. At one point, that included cowboy hats and boots and big buckles; at another, pleather Michael Jackson “Thriller” jackets and white socks. At another point, it included IZOD polo shirts and khakis, and I’ve always loved print shirts and coveralls (not necessarily together). I was a hustler in my late teens and early 20s and spent more money than I should have on clothes. (Remember those Versace silk shirts Tupac and Biggie used to wear? I just had to have one.) All the above to say, my love of fashion came first. I started playing organized basketball in the fifth grade, which is kind of late for serious hoopers. I did, however, play all the way through junior college, and even thought that I’d one day play professional basketball overseas. Meanwhile, I had a couple of friends make the NBA and spent a fair amount of time around them and other NBA players. I must’ve attended NBA All-Star weekend 10 years in a row. And anybody that has been to All-Star weekend knows it’s a fashion extravaganza.

One of the most illuminating aspects of this book is its incorporation of history, especially how different wars, political events and cultural movements affected American fashion trends. What was your research process like?
I’m so glad you point that out because that’s an important aspect of the book. Fashion is never born in a vacuum. I was really interested in what influenced what the players wore during any given period. First, though, I decided to organize the book into distinct eras. I needed these eras so I could research the spans of time I was focusing on. Then I’d hypothesize why the fashion of the time was what it was. Then I’d start researching to see if my idea held up. As someone who’s written a lot of nonfiction, and is constantly researching for it, that process felt very natural.

The eras you’ve chosen range from 1946 to the present: the Conformists, Flamboyance, Jordan, the Iverson Effect, Dress Code and the Insta-Tunnel Walk. How did you determine when one era ends and another begins?
I arrived at those divisions by looking at pictures from different time periods and noting the trends of those periods. If you look at photos of the early NBA players, they all wore the same thing: slim suits, dark shoes, skinny ties. But look at the 1970s and you’ll see individuals. Bell-bottoms. Fur coats. Butterfly collar shirts unbuttoned to mid-chest or below. Afros. Long beards. Jewelry. It was clear those players felt freer to express themselves with their fashion. After I noted the distinctions of the eras, I’d ask myself what was happening in the culture that shaped those choices, and then I’d research around that subject. The titles came from me trying to encapsulate the crux of each chapter in a word or a phrase.

If you look at photos of the early NBA players, they all wore the same thing: slim suits, dark shoes, skinny ties. But look at the 1970s and you’ll see individuals.

Do you have a favorite era of NBA fashion?
My personal favorite is a tie between the 1970s and now. Both are eras in which the players dress with copious creativity. I’d say in the ’70s though, the players had fewer professionals helping them. These days, many players have stylists and access to great brands, and the internet to hip them on trends, etc. Which also means many of them are more knowledgeable than the players of five decades ago. The players from the ’70s did more with less.

The photographs in Fly are amazing, and they really bring your colorful descriptions to life. What was the process of selecting those photos like? Do any of them hold a special kind of weight or inspiration for you?
Probably my favorite pic in the whole book is “Pistol” Pete Maravich in a suit, butterfly collar shirt, sunglasses and gold chain. I used to watch Pistol Pete’s skills tapes when I was young as well as the highlight footage. He was a wizard with the ball and had a really flamboyant game. And when I saw that pic, it seemed like the perfect representation of him as a player, and of what I imagined his personality would be. Also, it’s special because there are so few pictures of him out of uniform. Finding pictures of the old greats was satisfying in that way.

You note that during the Dress Code era (2010–2015), athletes started using their personal styles to express political views and to bring attention to social justice issues, such as when the entire Miami Heat team wore hoodies to honor Trayvon Martin. Do you have a favorite example of a player leveraging their image for good?
Not a player, but there’s a picture of the Lakers at center court during a game in the NBA bubble, all of them linked arm in arm, save LeBron James, who is holding his free arm up in the Black Power salute. It’s a powerful image and proof of the NBA’s stance on social protest. When Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists at the 1968 Olympics, they were blackballed from track and field for many years. When Colin Kaepernick took a knee in the NFL, he was blackballed out of the league. That pic of the Lakers, and LeBron in particular, is ironic in that it shows not only how far we’ve come but how much further we have to go in terms of justice and equality.

The players from the ’70s did more with less.

In the current era of Instagram fashion, players have more control over the personal expressions of their styles. Who do you think is one of the biggest and best fashion risk-takers right now?
Russell Westbrook is still one of the biggest risk-takers in NBA fashion. But because he’s already taken so many risks, it’s arguably less risky every time he does it. The same goes for James Harden, though one could argue he hasn’t had the same positive reception with his riskier outfits. I like what Jerami Grant is doing with the Portland Trail Blazers. He wears a lot of Maison Margiela, but it suits him. I admire when a player cultivates an aesthetic. On the other hand, it will be interesting to see where the players who’ve cultivated an aesthetic go next. Devin Booker comes to mind as an example of someone whose style could soon evolve.

This book includes a definitive ranking of the top 10 sneakers of all time. Where do you fall on the sneakerhead spectrum?
I have a lot, a lot of sneakers, but once I started buying high-end sneakers, I stopped paying so much attention to the Nike releases. Now I might be a loafer head. Or a Chelsea-boot head. I still love a Jordan 1 and 2, or 3. I love a Dunk. I loved that Nike x Sacai collaboration. But I wouldn’t say I’m a sneakerhead. I’m not collecting, and I also wear my sneakers. In truth, I can’t keep up enough with the releases to be a sneakerhead. It’s damn near a full-time job and for some it is a full-time job. Plus, I’m middle-aged.

Were there any particularly interesting facts that you uncovered while writing that didn’t make it into the book?
I can’t recall a particular fact not making it in the book, but I did write a section on the fashion of WNBA players. The problem was they didn’t come in until the last era because that was when the league was formed. My editors were concerned that including women that late in the book and in that amount of space could’ve made it seem as though they were insignificant, which they aren’t. So we took that section out. Hopefully, someone will write a book on WNBA and pro women’s fashion because they are certainly deserving of one. One of my favorite fashionistas is Sue Bird. And not to get off basketball, but Bird and Megan Rapinoe comprise one of the flyest couples around.

What’s next for you?
I’m working on a novel titled John of Watts about a Black cult leader (he’s also an ex-basketball player, go figure). I’m working on a profile of a Civil Rights leader, another of an OG hustler from my hometown. And I’ll continue to write my column for Esquire.

Author photo by Christa Harriis

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Mitchell S. Jackson explores the world of NBA fashion in Fly, a pictorial and cultural history of the influence basketball stars have had on style.

Mystery & Suspense Mystery Historical Mystery

William Kent Krueger dives into the darkness of 1950s America

A fictitious waterway plays a major role in William Kent Krueger’s mesmerizing new novel, The River We Remember, so it seems more than fitting when Krueger says, “Your first order of business as a storyteller is to hook your reader.”

And boy does he, like a seasoned angler reeling in a prizewinning bass. At the end of a short prologue, after describing how the Alabaster River snakes across Black Earth County, Minnesota, in “a crooked course like a long crack in a china plate,” Krueger describes the catfish that feed along the bottom before announcing “This is the story of how they came to eat Jimmy Quinn.”

“I had that opening in mind for a very long time before I actually sat down to write the story itself,” Krueger says, speaking by phone from his home in St. Paul, Minnesota. The author of 19 Cork O’Connor mysteries adds, “I’m very fond of both prologues and epilogues,” which he believes have distinct purposes: the prologue gives readers “a sense of the story that they’re about to be a part of,” and the epilogue is his way of not leaving them “high and dry, wondering about what happened to characters after the story ends.”

“That’s really where my heart is. . . . Whenever I write a story, I love to just tap into that small town sensibility.”

The River We Remember is set in 1958, when the gruesome discovery of Quinn’s body in the river casts a deep shadow on the town of Jewel’s Memorial Day festivities. Quinn is the richest man and largest landowner in the area—and someone whom no one seems to like, not even his family. It’s up to Sheriff Brody Dern to get to the bottom of how Quinn came to such an ignominious end. Upon hearing the news, Brody is playing chess in the county jail with a prisoner, an otherwise law-abiding widower prone to frequent, disruptive Wild Turkey-fueled benders that land him temporarily behind bars. The friendly, avuncular scene is reminiscent of “The Andy Griffith Show.”

Krueger laughs at the comparison, saying, “I don’t have a Barney Fife in my story, but yes.” Although The River We Remember is far from a comedy, he imbues Jewel and its intricate, long-established community with rare authenticity and warmth. The author explains that although he and his wife have lived in St. Paul for many years, he spent much of his childhood moving from place to place, living in farm towns in states like Ohio, Oregon and California. “That’s really where my heart is,” he admits. “Whenever I write a story, I love to just tap into that small town sensibility.”

The townsfolk include a diverse cast of multigenerational characters, such as retired sheriff Conrad Graff, who helps Brody investigate, and 14-year-old Scott Madison, born with a hole in his heart, who delivers meals to prisoners from his mother’s cafe. This young character, Krueger says—one of his favorites—is much like he was as an adolescent, especially in his “desire to see the world, experience it, and somehow prove to everybody that he really is a man.” With his trademark finely chiseled prose and taut plotting, Krueger uses his characters to explore a variety of themes, including racism, prejudice, war, violence, manhood, justice and redemption. “One of the things that I’m aware of,” Krueger says, “is that if you write a popular mystery series, readers are going to be a little reluctant to follow you to a place that doesn’t have all of the series’ characters and elements in it. When I set out to write this book, I wanted to write a mystery first and foremost, and then use that mystery to explore other themes.”

When The River We Remember’s similarities to To Kill a Mockingbird are mentioned, Krueger says the book is his favorite American novel, “so it’s no surprise that I’m probably greatly influenced in every story by Harper Lee.” However, he says the comparison is more apt for his previous standalone novel, Ordinary Grace, which he calls “a kind of reimagined” Mockingbird. “War informs The River We Remember,” he notes, “although it’s not a war novel.”

Book jacket image for The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger

Krueger first tried to write the book almost 10 years ago, inspired by his father’s experiences as an 18-year-old leaving to fight in Europe during World War II, as well as by similar ordeals suffered by his friends’ fathers. Each of them “were deeply wounded by the horrors they had seen, and the horrors that they had been a part of,” he says. “All my life, I’ve wondered, how did these men manage to heal from that, those great wounds? And what about the people they left behind—mothers and wives and sisters and fathers—who were praying desperately for their loved ones while they were far away, and who in the end may have lost them? What about those wounds? That’s really what I set out to explore.”

Brody is a World War II veteran, and Krueger writes that, “No one knew the details of his war experiences but they knew of the medals.” Brody has PTSD (although, of course, it wasn’t called that in 1958) after his experiences in combat and in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, while newspaper editor Sam Wicklow lost part of his leg in the battle of Iwo Jima. Many people in town suspect that Quinn’s killer may be Noah Bluestone, a Dakota Sioux veteran who returned with a Japanese wife, Kyoko. Krueger set his drama in 1958 so he could draw from some of his own childhood memories and because he “wanted a time frame that was soon enough after the war that the war experience is still going to be fresh in people’s minds. All of those deep wounds were still there, and yet we weren’t acknowledging them.”

However, Krueger’s first attempt at writing the story didn’t go well, so he put the idea aside for years, finally giving it another go during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I know the pandemic created a great deal of chaos in so many people’s lives,” he says, “but it was one of the most creative periods for me. I wrote two manuscripts for my Cork O’Connor series. I wrote three novellas, and then I turned my attention back to the original story for The River We Remember.”

“I don’t know what happened in the intervening years,” Krueger says. “Maybe I’d just grown wiser as a storyteller, or maybe it just required more time to gestate. But I saw how to write the story now. I heard the voice of the story speaking to me. And this time around, I was able to write a much tighter, more cohesive and more deeply felt narrative than I had created the first time around. I completely rewrote the story.”

“If you wrap the ideas that you want to get across to a reader in a really good, compelling story, you get the point across so much more effectively.”

“I wanted to talk about racism,” Krueger adds. “I wanted to talk about war, the way we characterize it, and the myth that we continue to feed our sons, particularly. But I didn’t want to write a polemic. Nobody’s going to read that, so if you wrap the ideas that you want to get across to a reader in a really good, compelling story, you get the point across so much more effectively.”

Krueger’s strong feelings against war emerged early and changed the course of his life. While a freshman at Stanford University in 1970, at the height of the Vietnam War, he joined a takeover of the president’s office to protest the university’s compliance in the production of military weapons. “They yanked my scholarship,” he says, noting that he had had a full ride. When asked if he was shocked, he says, “No, I was really inspired. And I have to tell you, when I called my folks to tell them what had occurred, they told me that they had never been prouder of me.”

“Vietnam,” he says, “for so many of us, was finally a look at the reality of the horror that war is, and the destruction that it does to everybody.” After leaving Stanford, he logged timber, worked construction and did a lot of physical labor. “I decided very early on that I wasn’t going to be a career person,” he says. “I didn’t want to have a job that was going to suck all of my creative energy out of me.” He was inspired by his father, who taught high school English, worked for Standard Oil, then returned to teaching.

Krueger settled in St. Paul in 1980 and took a job researching child development at the University of Minnesota while his wife, Diane, attended law school. He wrote early in the morning at a coffee shop before work, and joined a mystery writers’ support group called Creme de la Crime. “That group was really tremendously important in my development as a writer,” he says, “because they never let an easy answer pass.”

Read our starred review of ‘The River We Remember’ by William Kent Krueger.

Since those early days, his award-winning mystery series featuring private investigator Cork O’Connor, the half Irish and half Ojibwe former sheriff of Aurora, Minnesota, has sold more than 1.5 million copies. “In every book that I’ve written, even my standalones, the plight of the Native people here in Minnesota plays an important role,” Krueger says. “If you set a story in Minnesota, it’s hard to get away from the treacherous history of whites and the tragic history of the native people.” As he began researching the Ojibwe culture, he met and formed relationships with Ojibwe people, who, he says, “have guided me so beautifully. They’ve been so generous in their sharing.”

Krueger notes that if he were starting out today, he would probably refrain from writing about a Native character “because of the very volatile issue of cultural appropriation,” which was not as widely considered when he began writing the Cork O’Connor series in the early 1990s. “The feedback that I’ve had from my friends in the Ojibwe community, and from Native readers who’ve contacted me, has been very positive. That encourages me, but I’m always painfully aware that I’m a white guy trespassing on a culture not my own, and I work very hard to get it right.”

Krueger is currently penning his next Cork O’Connor mystery. “When I put that to rest,” he says, “I have another standalone that is just beating at my door, begging me to write it.” In the meantime, visit his website if you want to arrange a Skype or Zoom book club visit to discuss one of his many books. “I have zoomed with hundreds of book clubs,” Krueger says, “and I really enjoy it. It’s a great way to connect with readers. It’s not quite like being there in person, but you can still connect.”

Photo of William Kent Krueger by Diane Krueger.

A murder rips a midcentury Minnesota town apart in the author’s latest standalone mystery, The River We Remember.

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

To Mick Herron, failure is more interesting than success.

Mick Herron, author of the phenomenally successful Slough House espionage novels, has been hailed as the best spy novelist of his generation. His bestselling, award-winning series following MI5 agents who have fallen from grace expanded its fan base recently with “Slow Horses,” the 2022 Apple TV+ adaptation starring Academy and BAFTA award-winners Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas. Now, Herron will delight fans both old and new with his prequel to the series, The Secret Hours. Set in the post-Cold War era, Herron’s pithy and tense latest slowly reveals the cover-up of a classified op gone wrong, casting three decades of U.K. intelligence history in a radical new light.

How will the experience of reading The Secret Hours differ for new readers versus established fans of the series?
It’s impossible to quantify the experience of new readers, but I hope they’ll find The Secret Hours a story that’s complete in itself, and not feel excluded from any larger framework. Regular readers will notice familiar elements, though; for example, the Regent’s Park setup, which—as in the Slough House novels—is the center of the U.K. intelligence service. And there are a few Easter eggs along the way . . .

Does The Secret Hours have its own distinctive tone?
I hope so. Though set much in the same world as the Slough House novels, it features different characters and required a different narrative voice at times. It opens, for example, with a lengthy chase sequence, which is a bit more frantic than my usual openings. I wanted to drag the reader along—make them feel they’d been hijacked, almost.

“Genre writing is often dismissed as sub-literary, but only by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.”

What’s your typical practice in regard to research and verisimilitude for the series, and did you have to do anything different when taking on the Cold War era?
I’m not a great fan of research, for the most part, and only resort to it when absolutely necessary. When writing the Slough House books, I’m usually writing about London in the present day, so I can achieve a certain amount of verisimilitude simply through observation. But part of The Secret Hours is set in post-reunification Berlin—the years immediately after the Cold War ended—and this required a little more work. I focused on finding out what the city would have looked and smelled like. Who would have been most visible on its streets. What people did for entertainment. That sort of thing.

You’ve been hailed as the John le Carré of your generation. How did you feel when you first heard that comparison, and did it affect how you wrote?
Any comparison to le Carré is both hugely flattering and somewhat misapplied. Le Carré was unique—there’ll never be another. His work defined the Cold War era. My work will never match up to that. If the comparison has brought new readers to my books, it’s done me a favor, but I’ve never tried to live up to it in the sense of trying to write more like him. That would be doomed to failure.

Book jacket image for The Secret Hours by Mick Herron

What first piqued your interest in the world of espionage? Were you an avid spy novel fan as a young reader?
I read le Carré, of course, and also Deighton, and also—in many ways, more importantly—about a million other thrillers I no longer remember, of hugely varying quality. Quantity matters more at that stage. Reading everything you can get your hands on helps you develop your own intuition about storytelling: what works, what doesn’t, what’s new, what’s been done a hundred times. The spy novel, though, wasn’t a particular interest; just one among many. I liked most stories—I was a total addict. Still am.

Unlike the high-flying protagonists of many other espionage series, the inhabitants of Slough House are all outcasts in some way. What made you want to center spooks in professional purgatory?
It’s largely because I wanted to write about failure, which I find intrinsically more interesting than success. More relatable, too. Few of us know what it’s like to be a hero, or, say, freefall from a helicopter. But we’ve all had squabbles in the workplace.

Having studied English literature at Oxford, you have a deep and varied literary background. Who do you think of as important authorial influences? Do they cross genre boundaries?
There are dozens, hundreds, of writers I admire, but it’s not easy to say who I’m influenced by. They’re not necessarily overlapping categories anyway: There’s no living thriller writer I admire more than Martin Cruz Smith, but I don’t try to write like him and have never noticed myself doing so. A writer’s voice generally develops piecemeal, and by the time it’s formed, there’s no telling where its origins lie.

Thinking about it, I’ve probably been consciously influenced more by poets than by thriller writers. Not so much individual writers (though a keen-eyed reader might spot borrowed images, or even whole lines, from various poets on pages I’ve written) as the control that poetry requires: the weighing of individual words, the balancing of sentences with each other. All the things that go towards making writing seem natural. Genre writing is often dismissed as sub-literary, but only by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.

Read our starred review of ‘The Secret Hours’ by Mick Herron.

The Slough House series was recently translated to the screen via the spectacular “Slow Horses” TV show. What was your role in that development process and how did the team for “Slow Horses” come together?
Thank you for that “spectacular”! I have a consultant’s role on the show and spend time in the writers room, taking part in the discussions around adapting the plots and storylines so that they meet the demands of the new medium. The team itself was put together by the people, now my friends, who first approached me about the show: Jamie Laurenson, Hakan Kousetta and Gail Mutrux. I’m in their debt.

Were there ground rules or nonnegotiable elements that you had in mind or stipulated in the deal for “Slow Horses”?
I’m pretty sure they’re not allowed to kill or maim any of the characters without my express permission.

What are you reading now?
Like many people, I did a lot of re-reading—comfort reading—during the pandemic, and for me, the habit has endured. One of my go-to writers is Robert Goddard, many of whose works I’ve re-devoured these last few years. He’s a fabulous storyteller, consistently surprising without ever resorting to cheap trickery. His latest is out soon, and I’m looking forward to it, but I’m currently re-reading Out of the Sun.

Photo of Mick Herron by Jo Howard.

In The Secret Hours, the author reveals the secret backstory of Slough House, his series following MI5 agents who have fallen from grace.

Science Fiction & Fantasy Historical Fantasy Fantasy

S.L. Huang’s new epic fantasy is a battle cry of a book

In their high-octane and highly entertaining update of Water Margin, a classic Chinese novel about a band of noble bandits facing off against an oppressive government, S.L. Huang evokes the joyous spirit of classic martial arts films.

The characters of Lin Chong, a combat instructor who eventually joins the bandits, and Lu Junyi, one of Lin Chong’s aristocratic students, feel like they are in conversation: One strives for big change and the other strives to be a model minority. Did you conceive of them as two sides of the same coin from the start?
It’s somewhat unusual for me to plan a character arc to this extent, but yes, that was 100% planned. In the real world, I’m frequently frustrated by a sort of “flattening” of people who are in marginalized spaces; we’re frequently perceived as a monolith who must all have the same views and make the same choices. In reality, there are plenty of difficult intracommunity conversations.

I wanted to portray real-feeling people who cannot be easily “purity tested.” Lin Chong has had to fight and claw to achieve an unusual job and status for a woman, but is determined to keep her head down so as not to lose what she’s wrought for herself. Lu Junyi has more high-flying ideals, but she can also afford to: She’s wealthy and insulated, and her social progressivism is more of an academic than a lived variety. Both are good people on the whole, and both are somewhat frustrated by the other’s politics.

Without giving too much away, I wanted their arcs to, in a way, reflect and cross—and for both of them to fall toward a messier gray area where they have to acknowledge hard truths about themselves and their society.

“I’m always drawn toward writing what I don’t see.”

What do you think Lu Junyi would have been if she could have chosen for herself?
Hm, I think it depends on what life experiences she’s faced with. If you plopped her in modern times, she’d probably start off as the type of annoying college student who thinks she knows exactly what all the correct and moral answers are, and is a little bit judgy of people with other opinions. (Lots of us were like that in college!)

On the other hand, she’s open-minded enough that more and more exposure to people different from her would start to expand and complicate her worldview, just as it happens in the book. Although, hopefully less painfully for her.

Eventually, if she were born in modern-day America, I think she’d probably end up doing some pretty amazing media work for a nonprofit she’s passionate about! Elsewhere in the world, she’d probably be doing something similar, though perhaps with slightly more danger to herself . . .

Historically, there’s been a dearth of middle-aged protagonists—especially middle-aged women—in science fiction and fantasy, but that has begun to change in recent years. Why did you decide to center this story around older characters?
Partly because there HAS been such a dearth of such characters—I’m always drawn toward writing what I don’t see.

But also, for the story I wanted to tell, I needed characters who had some amount of life experience. I didn’t want this to be a story of only young prodigies; I wanted this to be a story that included people who’d had time to build extensive pasts, histories and baggage.

Many scenes—and characters!—are equal parts humorous and deadly. How did you strike that balance, and why was it important to you to bring it to the forefront?
The light but true answer is that I grew up on action-comedy movies! I love action, and I love it even more when it’s lightened by humor.

As much as I tried to treat the themes of The Water Outlaws deeply and seriously, I also wanted it to be escapist and fun.

Book jacket image for The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang

In addition to your work as an author, you’re also a Hollywood stunt performer and professional armorer. Your love of choreography definitely shines in The Water Outlaws, as does your love of wuxia, the Chinese historical fantasy genre that focuses on martial artists. What originally drew you to those worlds?
Honestly, I think the same thing that draws a lot of us to sci-fi & fantasy—a hunger for adventure and a love of imagination.

I’ve said before that I think I ended up doing stunts because it’s basically extreme LARPing, ha. I guess I never grew out of yearning for that immersive experience of living the stories I grew up with. And my favorites were always the ones with swords!

How did you approach translating the fantastical brutality of wuxia onto the page?
I tend to write my action in what I like to describe as a “cinematic” way, in that I want it to feel both real and also slightly larger than life. This fits very well with wuxia, which tends to have a similar feel—think, for instance, of martial arts movies that engage in fantastical wire work without any acknowledgment of special powers.

It’s always important to me to engage with the harm and consequences of physical violence—but equally important to me to write glorious, imagination-spanning sword fights!

We don’t see a lot of magic in the early parts of the book, but it’s always hovering on the edges of your world. What was interesting to you about taking this understated approach to magic?
This was very much informed by my love of wuxia! Supernatural elements are often extremely understated, or an accepted part of the world that only comes up when it comes up. It’s not an approach I see a lot in European-derived fantasy—where the magical world building is often a central focus—and I was very interested in writing in that paradigm.

Classical Chinese literature also tends toward this approach to the supernatural, that it’s an expected part of the world and not the focus of the narrative. This includes Water Margin, which was the direct inspiration that I was reimagining in this book!

You have a beautiful, poetic way of describing gender and bringing the nuances of gender fluidity to life. Why was it important for you to explore this territory in The Water Outlaws?
Well, it’s personal to me and to many of my friends. My day-to-day life intersects with a lot of queer spaces, so the gender diversity of the bandits is simply a reflection of my reality!

(Although I adjusted the terminology and dialogue about it for my fantasy world, as I didn’t want it to feel exactly one-to-one with how any modern culture talks about it today.)

Read our starred review of ‘The Water Outlaws’ by S.L. Huang.

Was there anything in Water Margin that you wanted to put in The Water Outlaws that just didn’t fit? And was there anything you were happy to leave behind in your own retelling?
There was so much that didn’t fit! In particular, three of my favorite characters—Hua Rong, Dai Zong and Wu Song—don’t appear in the main narrative. Hua Rong I managed to add into the epilogue as a master archer, but Dai Zong’s main ability, Taoist powers of traveling magically fast, was slightly too story-breaking to introduce. And Wu Song’s tale, which is full of tiger-fighting, adultery and revenge, was just far too large and expansive to do justice along with all the other pieces I was already focusing on.

Hopefully I can add some of them if there are sequels!

In terms of what I was happy to leave behind, there was plenty of that, too. I love Water Margin to death, but part of the reason I wanted to do a genderswapped version in the first place was that the original is such a highly male-centric and misogynistic tale. So that was first on my list to turn on its head in my retelling.

In particular, one of the bits I was pettily excited to cut was the marital fate of Hu Sanniang, one of only female bandits out of the 108. Despite its misogyny, the original rarely has our ultra-violent heroes engage in sexual violence or coercion, thankfully. But unfortunately, the reason for this feels a lot less like a knowledge that it’s wrong, and much more like a scorn of anything having to do with carnal desires. The bandits have a single member who shows strong desire for women, which is somehow equated with him carrying off women by force—and the leader stops him by “finding him a wife,” i.e., marrying him to one of the only three female bandits.

That female bandit is Hu Sanniang, an amazing fighter who is capable of beating most of the men, and one of the best characters in the original novel. I strongly object to how done wrong she was by this piece of the original book, and I took great delight in giving my Hu Sanniang a backstory of escaping an undesired marriage and cutting her would-be forced husband entirely.

Photo of S.L. Huang by Chris Massa.

The Water Outlaws is a paean to liberation and resistance—and also an absolute blast.

Science Fiction & Fantasy Fantasy

Alix E. Harrow had never written about her home state—until she left it

Alix E. Harrow and her husband know a thing or two about creepy old houses. Before they were married, they pooled their savings and bought an abandoned house on several acres of land in Madison County, Kentucky, in hopes of bringing it back to life. “It was such a wild choice,” Harrow recalls. “When we closed on the house and walked in, rain was coming into the second floor. We looked at each other and asked, ‘What are we doing?’ ” Nonetheless, over the next seven years or so, the couple forged ahead, completing almost all of the renovations themselves.

It’s not surprising, then, that a mysterious, dilapidated house is the subject of Harrow’s third novel, Starling House. The book features a down-on-her-luck young woman named Opal McCoy who takes a housekeeping job at the titular home, which has haunted her dreams since she was a girl. It’s an eagerly awaited, exceptional follow-up to the bestselling author’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January, a portal fantasy set in the early 1900s, and The Once and Future Witches, about suffragettes in the late 1800s who happen to be witches.

“What’s funny,” Harrow says, speaking from her home in Charlottesville, Virginia, “is that all my other books have historical settings, so with this one, I wanted to do contemporary. But then, of course, when I actually started to write it, I realized, oh, it’s all about the past, actually.”

The author is a pro at genre mashups, having also written two “fractured fables”—A Spindle Splintered and A Mirror Mended—that romp through classic fairy tales. “One of the fun things about writing a house book is that you get to play with all the literary tropes and traditions of haunted houses,” Harrow says. “But then I also know the very literal experience of dealing with an old, rotten house. There’s stuff about patching drywall and glazing old windows that are jokes just for me and my husband.”

“. . . this book is sort of like the dream of what if somehow, you could find a way to stay?”

Harrow describes her new novel as a Southern gothic Beauty and the Beast, with Opal as the beauty and her employer, Arthur Gravely, the beast—described in the book as a “Boo Radley-ish creature” whose face “is all hard angles and sullen bones split by a beak of a nose, and his hair is a tattered wing an inch shy of becoming a mullet.” Opal is desperate to get her younger brother, Jasper, out of their dingy hotel room and the dying town of Eden, Kentucky, so she takes the generous-salaried job Arthur offers. It’s a big step up from her shifts at Tractor Supply Company, and Opal is beyond curious to venture inside Starling House, despite the fact that inexplicable and terrifying things seem to happen there. For instance, both of Arthur’s parents mysteriously died within the house and Opal gets a strange, bloody cut on her hand the moment she touches Starling House’s gate—a cut that won’t seem to heal.

Harrow was initially inspired by a well-known John Prine song, “Paradise,” about how strip mining destroyed the town of Paradise in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. “It’s like a tiny little Kentucky Chernobyl,” Harrow says of what’s left of that town. “Now it’s dead financially and ecologically. So, I was like, ‘What if it had survived? And what if it was haunted more literally? And what about the people who would still kind of cling on and love it despite everything?’ ” Like Prine, whose parents came from Paradise, Harrow has deep Kentucky roots. Part of her childhood was spent two counties away from Paradise. Prine describes how the coal company used “the world’s largest shovel” to dig coal, and Harrow’s father actually rode that same power shovel to the top of a mountain. (The shovel is called “Big Jack” in Starling House.) “Mountain coal is my family,” she says. “I never met my maternal grandfather because he was killed by a coal train.”

Her father, in fact, jokingly accused her of plagiarism because “I’ve just taken all of these pieces of my life and put them into a different collage.” She acknowledges that she incorporated many bits from her past into her book, but is quick to clarify, “It is mostly details, not the overall shape of my childhood. I don’t want to give people the impression that I was seriously impoverished or living on the edge of society, in a motel. I had a stable, loving household and all of that stuff. But the details—like my first job, I graduated from college in the middle of the recession and I worked as a cashier at Tractor Supply in Allen County, Kentucky. So, there are a lot of things that were just familiar to me. But, of course, there is a lot of air between me and the actual characters.”

Book jacket image for Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

Interestingly, there’s no trace whatsoever of a Kentucky drawl in Harrow’s voice. She attributes this to her mom’s influence as an English teacher as well as her family’s move to Boulder, Colorado, for three years when she was 10. “You can lose an accent fast when someone makes fun of you for it,” she says.

Harrow began writing this book as she and her husband and two children moved from Kentucky to Virginia, and a sense of yearning informed the process—a feeling that’s hardly new. “I moved around quite a bit as a kid,” she explains, “even within Kentucky. And then when we left for Colorado, it was huge. I remember my dad literally saying to me, ‘Aren’t you a little young for nostalgia?’ I’m just a naturally wistful and nostalgic person. So I had in my head this idea of Kentucky and the idea of home.”

As she began writing Starling House, she realized that she hadn’t set any previous fiction primarily in her home state. “All my short stories were kind of about escape and going on adventures and going through magic doors,” she adds. “Like, finding a way out, which I now see pretty obviously was a fantasy of mine. I think it’s very funny that it was only once my husband and I decided to leave that I wrote a book about staying.” She says she had always wanted to make a home in Kentucky, “but then I had children and the political climate darkened. I just could not find a way to stay, given the means and resources and ability to find somewhere safer and kinder and with more possibilities for my children. So, this book is sort of like the dream of what if somehow, you could find a way to stay?”

Before turning to fiction, Harrow earned a master’s degree in history at the University of Vermont, then taught history at Eastern Kentucky University. She first tried her hand at writing a fantasy novel in middle school, but then didn’t write fiction again until she was in her 20s, working as an adjunct. She started writing short stories “as an experiment” and “I loved it,” she says, laughing.

A sense of history permeates Starling House: Harrow adds intriguing footnotes, as well as a bibliography containing both real and imagined sources. She also created a very convincing fake Wikipedia page within the novel for Eleanor Starling, one of Arthur’s ancestors, a 19th-century children’s writer who wrote a book called The Underland that Opal read as a child. That book plays a huge part in the novel, and harkens back to Harrow’s master’s thesis on British children’s literature in the late 1800s and early 1900s and its ties to imperialism.

“I never had a creative writing class or tried to pursue creative writing since middle school,” she says. “But the skills that you learn in academic historical writing are basically the same. You’re trying to build an argument about the world, you’re trying to make a narrative that makes sense based on little bits and pieces in support of your cause. All the research skills and all the organizational skills and the belief that if you just keep writing, eventually you’ll come to your point—all those things are not as far away from fiction as you would think. The same interests led me to history, which are basically just wanting to know why the world is the way it is and how power works.”

Read our starred review of ‘Starling House’ by Alix E. Harrow.

The novel’s corporate villain is Gravely Power, started by Arthur’s ancestors, which is lobbying to obtain the mineral rights of Arthur’s property. A relentless, devious company representative named Elizabeth Baine tries to bribe and blackmail Opal into spying on Arthur and photographing Starling House as she works. Harrow was inspired to create Elizabeth after writing The Once and Future Witches and encountering some reader reactions that were “very like, women are good and men are bad and having very little sort of critical engagement with the history of white feminism in ways that I found sort of teeth grating.” Harrow concluded she was ready for a change of pace, deciding her next villain would be a white woman as “certain forms of ambition are not specifically gendered.”

The Southern gothic, Harrow says, proved to be the perfect vehicle for this corporate showdown because one of its central conflicts can be “a huge nostalgia for a time that was just ontologically evil.” Harrow mentions the diverging viewpoints of white Southern gothic writers and Black Southern gothic writers, noting, “That’s why there’s so many different versions of the story of Starling House in the book—often it’s the same story told from a different perspective with wildly different ethics and takeaways.” As Opal hears these conflicting tales, she keeps digging to get closer to the truth, despite mounting danger.

Starling House incorporates other influences beyond Southern gothic, pulling from fairy tales and supernatural thrillers, with a touch of horror. Harrow admits, “I’ve never been particularly faithful to one single genre. I’ve always been kind of a messy reader. And when you come up with a book idea that dabbles in multiple genres, it’s almost like at the beginning of a history paper, when you want to have your historiography. I always want to be doing tropes on purpose. If it’s cliche, it’s a cliche on purpose.”

As Harrow describes her writing process, she sounds more like a historian than a fiction writer. Did she always know, for instance, how Opal would get along with Arthur? “Oh, I know everything from the start,” she replies, laughing. “I am not a casual drafter.” She begins with a general synopsis and a chapter-by-chapter outline before beginning to write. “And then I draft the book and realize that the whole thing is wrong,” she explains, “and go back and change it with a new outline. But very rarely—not never—but rarely, am I drafting a scene and like, ‘Oh my God, it just came out completely differently than I planned it.’ ”

She also notes that she is not “a haunted house person.” “When I wrote the witch book,” she recalls, “I got a number of very sweet and generous messages from people who were practitioners of witchcraft. I was very much like, ‘Oh man, I’m so sorry. Wrong audience.’” She anticipates that readers of Starling House may reach out with similar messages about ghosts and hauntings.

“I’m a huge chicken,” Harrow confesses.

What she is, it turns out, is a comedian—and one of Opal’s many endearing qualities is her often-snarky, sarcastic wit, as shown in both her narration and dialogue. Was her humor hard to write?

“No,” Harrow says with a laugh. “I find my main problem is to stop making jokes and try to rein it in a little bit.”

Photo of Alix E. Harrow by Elora Overbey.

The author poured her yearning for the past into Starling House, a fantasy that’s best described as a Southern gothic Beauty and the Beast.

Fiction Family Saga

A question of character

If you’ve been waiting with bated breath for the publication of Ayana Mathis’ next book, you’re not alone. The author herself was eager to finish The Unsettled, her sophomore novel. However, as Mathis explains during a Zoom call, the book—and particularly its characters—had other plans.

“There’s a really lovely origin story about The Twelve Tribes of Hattie,” says Mathis from her second home in the Hudson River Valley, where she went to escape record-breaking temperatures in New York City. Mathis began writing her 2012 debut, which was a New York Times bestseller and the second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, when a friend suggested several of her short stories could work as a book. The Unsettled, however, had no such beginnings. In fact, Mathis can’t recall the exact moment she knew what she was writing. “It was just a very long journey of becoming what it is,” she tells me. “I was writing around inside of it for a really long time.”

What The Unsettled became is a gripping novel about mothers and children, past and present, and the private hells in which we often find ourselves while searching for utopia. It opens in mid-1980s Philadelphia, where an unaccompanied 13-year-old named Toussaint Wright sneaks into an abandoned house with a stack of letters from his mother, Ava Carson, and grandmother, Dutchess. This image sets the tone for the rest of the book, in which Dutchess and Ava take turns telling the story of their estranged family. Toussaint, the novel’s youngest but most perceptive narrator, tries to make sense of his own history as well as the chaos of the present.

“I’m not concerned about likability in characters. But I do want people to be able to attach to Ava, and I need[ed] to, in order to write her”

While Mathis is no stranger to multivocal narratives (The Twelve Tribes of Hattie follows the lives of its eponymous matriarch, her 11 children and one of her grandchildren), the voices that compose The Unsettled are markedly different from her first book as well as from each other. Deceptively brief chapters carefully detailing Ava’s and Toussaint’s trek through the streets of Philadelphia are interspersed with Dutchess’ no-nonsense dispatches from Bonaparte, Alabama, where she is fighting to save her small, all-Black town from extinction. In each character, Mathis’ dexterity of voice is on full display. This is a riveting family story, and the people who tell it do so with finesse. For Toussaint, broken windows create “glass rain [that] sparkled like tinsel.” When Ava recalls meeting Toussaint’s father, Cassius Wright, for the first time, she describes her immediate infatuation with the man who was “the same tawny gold color all over: eyes and skin and hair.” To Dutchess, Alabama highways are “flat as a white woman’s behind.” Developing the kind of intimacy necessary to create these distinct voices was no small feat. Dutchess and Toussaint came easily to Mathis. Ava, however, was much harder to pin down. Proud, impulsive and prone to depression and prophetic trances, Ava is both pitiable and, at times, infuriating, even to her creator. “She and I had a terrible relationship for years,” Mathis says, shaking her head. “She refused to have a voice that was recognizable to me. She was very resistant.”

Even her name kept changing: Mathis was only able to find something that fit after she grew to accept Ava as an individual, flaws and all. “I’m not concerned about likability in characters,” Mathis explains. “But I do want people to be able to attach to Ava, and I need[ed] to, in order to write her more fully. I need[ed] to think of her as a full human being, not just someone I’m angry at or judging.”

Indeed, part of Mathis’ struggle to finish The Unsettled was the effort to map out the actions of the adult characters whose disastrous decisions drive much of the book’s plot. At the nadir of Dutchess’ nightclub singing career, she meets and marries Caro Carson, a native of Bonaparte, a town partially inspired by Gee’s Bend, Alabama. In the 1930s, the federal government sold tracts of land to its Black citizens as part of Roosevelt’s war on rural poverty. When Caro is killed by jealous local whites, Dutchess descends into a near-catatonic state that almost destroys both her and her daughter. Consequently, once Ava leaves Bonaparte as a young adult, many of her life choices are made to avoid returning home or becoming like her mother.

After a failed marriage, Ava reunites with Cass, who founds Ark, a commune for Black people in search of self-determined living. But soon, Ava is immobilized by his increasing radicalism and his sadistic means of controlling Ark’s inhabitants. Despite Ava’s best efforts, she and her mother are more alike than different. As Mathis points out, “Both of [them] meet men with whom they become completely and utterly enamored, sometimes to the detriment of their children. They’re [also] both drawn to these nontypical Black communities that are trying to find something like freedom, and struggling with what that is or what it might look like.” For both Ava and Dutchess, the search—and the fight—for home becomes paramount, yet a sense of home itself remains elusive. And in both cases, their children suffer for it.

Cass, a former Black Panther and disgraced physician, is also a complicated character. While his beloved Ark bears some similarities to 6221 Osage Avenue, the site of Philadelphia’s 1985 MOVE bombing, both he and his commune are more homage than historical fiction. Mathis, a Philadelphia native, describes that bombing as “an open, raw wound,” and says she is not attempting to tell its story in The Unsettled. Instead, her novel talks “about what the implications of something like that might be. What it means in terms of Black people and police interactions.”

“What I hope is that people enter the book in a spirit of generosity so they can spend some time with these people, even though they might hate them sometimes . . . . Remember that they are people and remember how infuriating the people we love can be.”

Likewise, Cass Wright is not a fictionalization of MOVE’s founder, John Africa. In fact, Mathis turned to many places for inspiration in her effort to complicate this handsome yet merciless figure. “I imagined him as this super charismatic shyster preacher who is taking everybody’s money,” she says with a smile. “But as I wrote him, I realized I wanted him to be right about some things. . . . He’s right about all of the issues around freedom. He’s right about the exploitation of Blackness. But he’s a pretty bad guy.” Cass becomes both Ava’s lover and her tormentor; her salvation, but also her obsession. Even in this way, Ava is not much different from Dutchess. As Mathis says, “She’s much more prone to fantasies and ideals whereas her mother is obsessed with this historical past. And they both in many ways sacrifice their lives to those enterprises.”

Still, Mathis warns against the danger of simply designating characters’ choices as good or bad. “A lot of this book is about the ways in which people figure out for themselves what survival looks like. And not just what surviving looks like, but what thriving looks like,” she explains. “And what that looks like for these people may not be what it looks like on a television show about the middle class.”

This is especially true for Toussaint, who realizes early that Ark might not be the paradise for which his mother has been searching. Once he discovers this, he begins making plans for their escape. “I think of Dutchess as a past, and Ava as a present,” says Mathis. “And Toussaint is the bridge between the two of them, and he’s also the future. There needed to be a future.”

Although he is still a young boy, Toussaint’s insights about the adults around him contextualize their actions even when he himself does not fully understand them. Despite Ava’s and Dutchess’ many failures, Toussaint’s love for them is persistent, and his desire to mend the rift between generations keeps the reader rooting for the survival of the entire family, even in their darkest moments.

Near the end of our interview, when I asked Mathis what she wanted readers to know, she offered words that could have been spoken by Toussaint himself: “What I hope is that people enter the book in a spirit of generosity so they can spend some time with these people, even though they might hate them sometimes,” she says with a laugh. “But still remember that they are people and remember how infuriating the people we love can be. The people we love hurt us more than anyone else. And we are more privy to their failures than to anyone else’s.”

The Unsettled, with its chorus of intergenerational voices and its themes of love, loss and legacy, contains many of the things Mathis’ loyal readers most enjoy. But there are also new characters to love and hate (or love to hate), and a story that is heartbreaking yet hopeful in ways that continue to surprise and sustain throughout. More than a decade in the making, it was definitely worth the wait.

Read our starred review of The Unsettled.

Author photo by Beowulf Sheehan.

Ayana Mathis’ The Unsettled is a gripping novel about mothers and children, past and present, and the private hells in which we often find ourselves while searching for utopia. With its chorus of intergenerational voices and its themes of love, loss and legacy, it contains many of the things her loyal readers most enjoy, along with a story that is heartbreaking yet hopeful.

Children's & YA Picture Book Children's

Bob Odenkirk and Erin Odenkirk revisit a treasure chest of family poems

You’d know the sound of Bob Odenkirk’s voice anywhere: its punchy, dexterous cadence has captivated audiences for decades, from his earlier days hosting the sketch comedy series “Mr. Show” to his legendary turn as smarmy yet sympathetic criminal lawyer Saul Goodman on “Breaking Bad” and its prequel, “Better Call Saul.” It turns out that same voice is also perfectly suited for reading children’s poems, which Odenkirk demonstrates on a video call from his Manhattan apartment by launching into an effortless impression of a nasally, feeble-voiced doctor character he once used to entertain his daughter, illustrator Erin Odenkirk, and her brother, Nate Odenkirk. “Has the child had enough hot fudge?” he croaks, running his words together in a manner that would delight any kid.

Erin, joining the call from Brooklyn, says it was “the silliest thing you’ve ever heard when you’re 6.” Dr. Bluestone, who thinks kids need to eat more sweets—“Have you administered any sprinkles lately? / They should be ingested daily”—is part of a cast of memorable characters that populate Zilot & Other Important Rhymes, an illustrated poetry collection that Bob and his children started around 20 years ago as part of a family activity that began with bedtime reading.

“We read to our kids every night as part of our nighttime ritual, starting when they were 2 months old.” Together with his wife, Naomi Odenkirk, Bob introduced his children to the likes of Dr. Seuss and Caleb Brown (Dutch Sneakers and Flea Keepers), and the family went through at least four or five picture books—sometimes more—each night.

A few years into this tradition, Bob considered how to further help his children feel empowered as creators. “One of the things that I feel held me back in my journey was just believing that writing or being a director or being an actor was allowed—that it was a possibility for me. You may look at my career and say, ‘Well, I don’t think you were held back very much.’” (Understandable, considering Bob was a “Saturday Night Live” writer at 25). “But even after I was working professionally, I still had years of going, ‘Can I do this? Is this okay? . . . Am I allowed?’ And I just think that mentality is worthless. It’s one thing to perceive writing or acting or being in the arts as challenging . . . But it’s not helpful to believe that you don’t belong, that you shouldn’t be allowed to do this, that you’re not worthy of it.”

“So I thought, right from when they were little, why don’t I write a poem with the kids after we read five books.” The family—including Naomi, who came up with a few of the poems in Zilot—did this about twice a week and ended up with around 80-100 poems: “I wouldn’t always fix things. I would let them write a silly line or pure nonsense.” Bob made sure that his children saw that he wrote each poem down—regardless of quality—in a book that he called Old Time Rhymes, which he stuck on a shelf.

“It’s one thing to perceive writing or acting or being in the arts as challenging . . . But it’s not helpful to believe that you don’t belong.”

Erin would grow up to obtain a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Critical and Visual Studies, from Pratt Institute in New York, and Old Time Rhymes always remained in the back of her mind. She considered what to do with the book, taking inspiration from illustrator and family friend Travis Millard, who often creates art based on his old journals.

Bob was also interested in making something from the poems in Old Time Rhymes, but any plans were far off: “I actually thought: When I’m a grandpa, I’ll sit down and rewrite these.”

But along came COVID-19. “I had to come home from college during the pandemic, as a lot of people did,” Erin says. “I was just sitting around in my room. . . . So my dad took initiative and pulled [Old Time Rhymes] out.”

“Everybody was wondering what to do with their time during the pandemic,” Bob says. “Erin had spent all her life becoming an artist. She’d gone to college and done lots of work developing her style. I thought: Now’s the time. And we got to work.”

For Erin, illustrating Zilot meant returning to the poems with an adult perspective: “I was surprised to find just how unabashedly silly and creative they were. I feel like I am a creative and silly-at-times person, but you lose some of that as you get older, and you start to believe you never were that way. It was really sweet to go back and find that sort of childhood rawness—to have things that you totally forgot about be triggered in memory.” She cites one of the earliest poems in the book,”A Trip to the 99-Cent Store” as an example. “It was something that we would do: go to the 99-cent store. Each of us would get $2 to buy whatever we wanted. That was a genuine joy. To be reminded of both that experience and what was fun to me about it at the time was wonderful.”

“Working together as adults was also wonderful and interesting,” Erin says. “I think a lot about how glad and honored I am that Bob trusted me to do this with him. . . . He was willing to work with me on something back when I was 19, which meant a lot to me.” Every day, Erin would share her her illustration drafts with Bob, even those on which she felt stuck. “Every single time he would go, ‘Oh, I have an idea.’ And the kid in his idea would always have the same facial expression: an ‘I’m up to no good’ kind of smirk. It’s so funny to think of this world in that way—it was our sort of ‘I’m up to no good’ world. I grew up with that, and now we’ve translated it to give to everyone.”

Read our starred review of ‘Zilot & Other Important Rhymes’ by Bob Odenkirk and Erin Odenkirk.

From a parent’s perspective, Bob couldn’t help but think of the Monty Python sketch where John Cleese plays a lawyer who visits his mom—except she can’t stop cooing over him and squeezing his cheek as if he’s a baby. “Having a kid is just where some part of your brain is broken. You just see that person as a child, even though they’re an adult now, and it’s hard to shake it. That’s why Erin calls me Bob; I think she’s constantly trying to reset the energy: ‘I’m an adult too now.’“

“I remember trying to call you Bob once when I was 10 or 11,” Erin adds. “Just to see what would happen. And you were like, ‘No, we’re not there.’”

Before she began illustrating for Zilot, Erin’s art was a lot more “conceptual and darker” than what would be fitting for children’s audiences: “I had to let go of a lot of the rules I typically follow or maybe the intentions I typically have, and it takes a lot of work to let go.” Luckily, she was in her childhood home, and could look through all her old books for inspiration—Shel Silverstein, MUTTS by Patrick McDonnell, Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes. ”I started to really try to figure out what I liked about those things. What I thought I liked was that they were pen and ink, but I realized I also really liked the energy they had and their detail within simplicity.”

The end result was illustrations befitting bedtime poems. “I like Erin’s colors,” Bob says. They’re calm and warm.”

Working on children’s poems was also a sharp deviation for Bob who—once lockdowns were lifted—was busy portraying the consequences of Jimmy McGill’s moral corrosion for the ruminative final season of “Better Call Saul.” “It was really hard,” he says. “I mean, I need to be sort of singularly focused. I think a lot of guys are that way. I’m that way for sure. So I wasn’t so able to work on “Saul” and then just go home and write Zilot poems. I needed to have these breaks where I was able to refocus myself. . . . I would then go do Saul and lose myself in that role and in that energy. Then I would come back to this.”

About half of the book came directly from the poems Bob wrote with his children years ago, but the other 40-or-so poems were written the second time around with Erin and Nate as adults. “You don’t have a little kid there to ask ‘What happened to you today? What are you thinking about? . . . So I had to do another acting exercise of imagining I was talking with a little kid or seeing the world as kids do, from a lower height—the things that are such an important part of their day, you know: food, things that scare them, things they’re unsure of, bugs, cleaning up.”

Acting contributed to Zilot, but Bob is also fundamentally a writer, and he sees similarities between the poems and the “Saturday Night Live” and “Mr. Show” comedy sketches that got him started in show business: “They’re short pieces; they have a comedy concept. They have a journey. If you do them right, there’s a bit of an arc to them.”

Zilot was not picked up immediately by publishers. One even asked if Bob and Erin could make the tone “louder” and “more abrasive.” Although they considered it, Erin says they realized “it would have been phony.”

“I think that we differ from Shel Silverstein in a way, in the gentleness of our stuff,” Bob says. These poems “come from a sweeter place. They come from a kid’s point of view.” After all, the titular poem, “Zilot,” comes from a word Nate invented to describe a blanket fort. “We have no idea where he got this. This is like a brain fart [from] a 6-year-old. But we liked the word.”

According to Erin, “Giving kids the context and the permission to use big words, or pick a big word that’s theirs, or invent a new word even, is part of the goal of this book.” Bob encouraged his children to be free with words such as felicitations, undaunted, rambunctious or fulsome (as in “fulsome logs,” to describe dog poop).

The perspective of Zilot is “half grown-up, half six-year-old thinking. Hopefully combined, like in a blender,” Bob says. “‘Grandma’s Skin’ is me talking to my aunt Leona . . . who used to share all of her doctors, pains and medical problems with us. As a kid, you hear that stuff and you go . . . ‘I’m five, I don’t know any doctors,’” Bob says. “I wanted to write a poem to other adults saying, ‘Hey, calm down with your medical problems. Kids can’t help you. Leave them be.’”

“It was really sweet to go back and find that sort of childhood rawness—to have things that you totally forgot about be triggered in memory.”

Some of the poems grapple with serious themes: “A Cat Named Larry” is about a cat who outlives his pet mouse. “It’s a touchy, difficult thing to share feelings of loss with kids,” Bob says. So he wanted to write a poem about death. “In the course of their lives, most kids—if they have pets—will have to say goodbye to a pet. This is one pet saying goodbye to its pet.”

“Those sorts of poems were important to us to write,” Erin says. “But they were a bit tricky to find the way to say it [as] you might if there was a kid in the room.”

For example, “The Theory of Incrementalism” is “definitely engineered by a dad,” according to Bob. “It’s telling your kid you can do big things, but they all start with small steps.” The poem was inspired by a parkour documentary: “A guy looks into the camera, and he goes, ‘It’s called the Theory of Incrementalism.’ He talks about how, when you do parkour, you just do a little jump, then a bigger jump. . . . Every day you do a little bit, you push it a little further. . . . It’s really an approach to life that you want to share with kids.”

Of course, “The Theory of Incrementalism” doesn’t lose the playfulness that runs through Zilot: “Silliness can help if you have a lesson you want to share,” Bob says. “You still get to talk about the subject matter, but it undercuts some of the pedantic quality.”

Ultimately, for Bob, “all our messages are in this book.” He and Erin would like readers to know: “Please have a laugh. We wrote it for you to laugh at it and smile. We hope you will try things: write your own poems, invent your own words and draw your own drawings.”

Headshot of Bob Odenkirk by Naomi Odenkirk.

During the COVID-19 pandemic—and later, while Bob was filming the last season of “Better Call Saul”—the Odenkirks imagined the world from a child’s perspective as they revised poems written decades earlier.

Science Fiction & Fantasy Fantasy

A bookseller helped inspire Cassandra Clare’s adult debut, ‘Sword Catcher’

Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunter Chronicles is one of the cornerstone series of the modern YA fantasy boom. To mark the release of her first-ever book for adults, Sword Catcher, we asked Clare about her most cherished library memories, book-browsing habits and more.

What are your bookstore rituals?
I always make a beeline for either young adult or fantasy. I want to see what’s new in both genres so I poke around the table displays. I look for shelf talkers, because I want to see what individual booksellers are recommending. After that, I like to drift and see what catches my eye. I am drawn to beautiful covers and design—who isn’t! In the end, I will always end up with an armful of totally disparate books, like a YA fantasy novel, a World War II history, some science nonfiction and a mystery.

Tell us about your favorite library from when you were a child.
I grew up in Los Angeles, and even though I didn’t live in Beverly Hills, my mother took me to the Beverly Hills library because it was the biggest. It had a glass facade so the books always seemed to be bathed in a magical glow. And it had an amazing mosaic mural that it took me years to realize was designed to appear as a shelf of books wrapping around the building!

While researching your books, has there ever been a librarian or bookseller who was especially helpful?
One of the things I love about going on tour is that often after the event, you can chat with booksellers about what they’re reading right now and get recommendations. Once a bookseller handed me a copy of Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads, even though it’s not in a genre I write in at all. I was totally absorbed by it, and it ended up being an inspiration for Sword Catcher.

Read our review of ‘Sword Catcher’ by Cassandra Clare.

Do you have a favorite bookstore or library from literature?
I would pick the library from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. It contains all the books that writers didn’t get a chance to write, but only dreamed up. I remember “The Man Who Was December” by G.K. Chesterton being one, and a Raymond Chandler that never made it to shelves. I love the idea because I often do dream of story ideas, but they never stay with me past the few moments after waking up.

Do you have a “bucket list” of bookstores and libraries you’d love to visit but haven’t yet? What’s on it?
I’d love to visit Livraria Lello, in Porto, Portugal. It’s always on lists of the most beautiful libraries in the world. It has all this carved wood and a huge central staircase and a stained-glass skylight. Plus, the bookstore has vending machines around the city in case you crave a book outside of business hours!

What’s the last thing you bought at your local bookstore?
I bought a copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrated by Arthur Rackham.

How is your own personal library organized?
By genre! Sometimes it gets complicated: Does dark fantasy go in horror or fantasy? What about futuristic mysteries? But generally I have an idea of what genre space the book occupies in my head, so I’ll shelve it there.

Bookstore cats or bookstore dogs?
Cats. I love dogs and cats but there’s something cozy about a bookstore cat.

What is your ideal bookstore-browsing snack?
I might bring a coffee drink (usually a mocha) or a tea, lid firmly on, into a bookstore, but I wouldn’t bring snacks—I don’t want to mess up the books!

Photo of Cassandra Clare by Sharona Jacobs.

The YA fantasy icon reveals how she organizes her personal bookshelf and her favorite fictional library.

Diana Helmuth dedicated a year to learning everything she could about witchcraft

In her earliest days of practicing witchcraft, Diana Helmuth gathered a number of recommended supplies—a special dagger called an athame, many candles, a pentacle. She also carried with her a number of expectations. For starters, she would trace the historical origins of modern witchcraft; this would ground her practice in a knowledge of its roots. She expected to find it structured like many organized religions: a set of rules and doctrines, a built-in community and moral framework—and the security of knowing what happens when you die.

But the practice had its own plans for Helmuth. “Witchcraft was quickly revealed to me to not be that kind of path,” she tells BookPage.

In The Witching Year: A Memoir of Earnest Fumbling Through Modern Witchcraft, Helmuth tells the story of dedicating 12 months to learning everything she could about what one fellow witch calls “the crooked path.” Living with her partner and two cats in an apartment in Oakland, California, Helmuth performs solo spellwork at a cardboard-box altar in her office nook (naturally, the cats are intrigued) and participates in Wheel of the Year rituals in the company of fellow witches. She journeys to Stonehenge in search of a connection with her ancestors, and spends a week at a camp for witches in the woods. Her research takes her deep into the tangled beginnings of Wicca, which emerged around the 1940s and was more or less an attempt to package witchcraft into something resembling that familiar box of midcentury Western religion. (Scott Cunningham’s Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner remains a widely respected text for aspiring witches.)

“Experiencing the sensation (while sober!) that we are all made from the same star stuff . . . is perhaps the greatest way this year changed me.”

Throughout the year, Helmuth consults a number of witches who also happen to be some of her closest and oldest friends. (Her friend Lauren, a key mentor in the book, nudged Helmuth toward this project in the first place.) Now living on the Washington coast, Helmuth acknowledges that at one point she counted among her friends and acquaintances more witches than people of any other belief system aside from atheism. She attributes this to her northern California upbringing. “That’s where all the hippie buses broke down. And that’s where we came out of the yurt and said, ‘We’re bringing goddess culture back.’ ”

Helmuth has an easy wit—her first book, a beginner’s guide to backpacking, is cheekily titled How to Suffer Outside and is full of both practical advice and hilarious commentary. In a way, the same can be said of The Witching Year. Her wry perspective keeps the narrative deeply entertaining. But it’s also an endeavor with ample heart, rigorous inquiry and an extensive bibliography. Comedic tendencies never eclipse Helmuth’s genuine curiosity about, and respect for, her subject matter.

“I didn’t want to punch down,” she says, “despite the fact that I knew I had massive internal skepticism.” When she forced herself to look closely at the impulse to crack jokes, her personal journey really took off: “Deeply interrogating this urgent need to make fun of something is, occasionally, where the book deviated from a comedy into something far more serious, and I think richer,” she reflects.

Helmuth ultimately found that modern witchcraft in America is largely self-directed and not confined to any set of top-down, codified methods. This could, she admits, feel challenging at times. She found that the practice was “more about the discovery and healing and nourishment of the sacred self. So effectively, it’s therapy. And that work is hard and never done.” She adds, “I don’t actually think it’s particularly enjoyable work.”

The Witching Year contains candid chronicling of the challenging emotional endeavors her practice requires. “There are several parts in the book [when] I was like, ‘I want to get off the ride,’ and I couldn’t,” she says. Ultimately, the year included “really profound moments that absolutely changed my life in good ways and bad ways.” In the book she discusses the delight of feeling deeply interconnected with others: “Experiencing the sensation (while sober!) that we are all made from the same star stuff . . . is perhaps the greatest way this year changed me,” she writes. About communing with the goddess Isis, she reflects, “I had no idea this level of joy was this accessible to me on my own. In Witchcraft, people talk about shadow work, justice, self-help. . . . Rarely do I hear anyone talk about bliss.”

And as a defender of wild spaces and a staunch environmentalist (which many, but not all, witches are), Helmuth gains perspective—but again, maybe not what she expected. To her surprise, the spirituality she’d always sought in the backcountry could be accessed closer to home. “I realized I didn’t have to hike 20 miles into the wilderness to have a deep connection with nature,” she says. “I can go down to the oleander under the freeway overpass and stare at it for 60 seconds and meditate on its perfection.”

Now for the big question: After a year’s journey, does she call herself a witch? Not exactly, she concedes, partly because the term is so loaded. How one answers largely depends on who’s asking. She would like to see modern witchcraft cast as less rebellious and more friendly to the mainstream. The enormous number of books about magic and witchcraft in the marketplace, I point out, suggest that this might be happening. “I do ultimately think it’s a good thing,” she says, “because it’s about self-empowerment. And the more people who are self-empowered, the less miserable they’ll be. And isn’t that just a nicer planet to live on?”

Photo of Diana Helmuth by Rob King

The Witching Year is funny, sympathetic and right on time.

Mystery & Suspense Mystery Historical Mystery

Murder in Winston Churchill’s war rooms

When Evelyne Redfern is selected for a position in Winston Churchill’s underground cabinet war rooms, typical new job nervousness is quickly replaced by horror when a colleague is murdered. Soon, the clever and charismatic Evelyne finds herself teaming up with handsome and cagey minister’s aide David Poole in an effort to solve the murder and root out treason amid the ranks—even as bombs fall overhead.

Congratulations on kicking off a new series! Will you introduce us to Evelyne Redfern?
The daughter of a famous English adventurer and a glamorous French socialite, Evelyne Redfern rose to international fame in the 1920s when her parents’ contentious divorce and custody battle placed her firmly in the pages of newspapers and earned her the nickname “The Parisian Orphan.” However, when Evelyne’s mother suddenly died, her father uprooted her from her life in Paris and dumped her in an English boarding school.

Now in her early 20s and working in a royal ordnance factory as part of the war effort, she’s recruited by an old friend of her parents to work as a typist in Churchill’s cabinet war rooms. However, when Evelyne discovers the body of a fellow typist, she finds herself at the center of the desperate chase for a killer.

You’ve written contemporary romance, historical romance and historical fiction, nearly all set in England. And you’re an American expat living in London. Tell us more about your connection to the U.K.
Although I grew up in Los Angeles, I have the good fortune to be both American and British by birth thanks to my British mother and American father. Because of this, my family has always had a strong connection to the U.K. I chose to study British history at university, and it seemed only natural to write about British history when I began seriously pursuing a publishing career while working as a journalist in New York City.

Eventually, I decided to move to London to be closer to my immediate family, who had all relocated to the U.K. As I explored my new city, I kept coming across World War II monuments. I became curious, and as I began to read as much as I could about the period, the book ideas began flowing.

“A lot of my compulsion to write about the past is wrapped up in trying to understand the present.”

In your acknowledgements, you share that you’ve always wanted to write a mystery and followed a “long and winding path” to get here. What sorts of twists and turns did you encounter?
I’ve been toying with writing a mystery set in the Churchill War Rooms, which are now a museum, ever since I went to visit with a friend. However, at the time I was already writing historical novels highlighting what British women did during the war and I was also working a day job, so I didn’t think I could add a mystery novel to the mix and still find the time to sleep! That all changed in June 2021 when I quit my day job to write full time. After taking a month off to recharge, I wrote up the pitch for A Traitor in Whitehall and the Parisian Orphan series and sent it to my agent that same week. The rest, as they say, is history.

You do an excellent job of immersing the reader in Evelyne’s daily life, from the line for the shower at her boarding house to the shiver-inducing feeling of working deep underground. What was your research process like?
I really lucked out with living in London and having access to the Churchill War Rooms. (Note to other authors: It is incredibly helpful when there is an entire museum dedicated to the subject of your book!) The Imperial War Museum has a fantastic catalog available online as well as great books. I leaned heavily on an exhibition catalog for the CWR that showed everything from the orange passes that workers would carry to the type of typewriter that was used in the typing pool.

When it came to researching the rest of the book, I had the good fortune of having written four historical novels set during WWII, so I had a lot of prior knowledge that I could draw on for the details of everyday life during the Blitz.

Book jacket image for A Traitor in Whitehall by Julia Kelly

Evelyne and David conduct numerous interviews as they winnow down their list of suspects, and you’ve created a very in-the-moment feel for those encounters. How did you go about achieving that realism?
I worked as a TV news producer for six years in New York City, and part of my job was to write the copy that my anchors would read. Writing words that are meant to be read out loud is a very different discipline than writing prose because you have to think about breath and tone and simplicity. (Case and point, that last sentence would be challenging to read off of a teleprompter!) That early training in TV writing still helps me to this day when tackling dialogue in my novels.

Evelyne’s own mother’s death wasn’t properly investigated, influencing her choices and actions. Is the theme of history repeating itself something you are drawn to while writing historical fiction?
A lot of my compulsion to write about the past is wrapped up in trying to understand the present. Most of my research at university was about the evolving role of British women in society, as well as changing class structures. Those two themes thread through a lot of my books because they’re still topics that feel very relevant today.

Evelyne understands the power of gossip in the workplace. Can you share a bit about why you made gossip an important element of the investigation?
When I started writing about an amateur female detective in 1940, I knew that one of the things she would inevitably have to contend with was men constantly underestimating her. Although the male detectives working on the case dismiss her, her eventual sidekick David Poole quickly understands that Evelyne has access to knowledge and information—like office gossip—that he never would. Being a woman is one of Evelyne’s great superpowers.

Female friendships are central to your story, from Evelyne’s long-term bond with aspiring actress Moira to her tentative new rapport with her coworkers and housemates. Why does that sort of affection and loyalty interest you as a writer?
My friendships with other women are such an important part of my life; it would be strange for me not to give my characters those kinds of relationships too. Female characters deserve rich, complex interior lives and relationships that reflect that. I hope that, just as we’re starting to see more layered female characters in television and movies, there will be even more of a push towards literary heroines with rich lives as well.

“Being a woman is one of Evelyne’s great superpowers.”

Evelyne is never without a book, and her favorite authors include Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie and Margery Allingham. Are you also a reader and devoted fan of these writers? Did they or their work inspire you as you created A Traitor in Whitehall?
I have been reading mysteries for as long as I can remember, influenced in great part by my mother. She’s such an avid reader of crime fiction that we call the part of my parents’ house where all of those books sit “Murder Hall.” When I told her my idea for A Traitor in Whitehall, she recommended I read The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards, which is a wonderful overview of the authors of the age and their works. I quickly realized that I had only scratched the surface of the genre, and I’ve been devouring golden age mysteries ever since to try to catch up.

Police detectives greet Evelyne’s penchant for mystery novels with patronizing dismissiveness. Do you think whodunits are underappreciated? Have you ever found yourself defending your fondness for them?
I think it’s sometimes easy for people to dismiss genre fiction because they think it’s all formulaic. However, I’ve always loved Nora Roberts’ quotation comparing writing category romance to performing “ ‘Swan Lake’ in a phone booth.” I will always defend genre fiction as deceptively sophisticated because, as a writer, you know that your reader will have certain expectations for your book. If you write a mystery novel, the detective needs to have figured out the central puzzle by the end of the book. However, there’s real challenge in writing a fresh, exciting story that manages to surprise the reader along the way.

Who’s your favorite side character (and why is it the slyly fabulous Aunt Amelia)?
Aunt Amelia is absolutely my favorite side character because I think she has the bold straightforwardness I would want if I was a little braver. She also is a woman with a past that’s only hinted at in A Traitor in Whitehall. While I have an idea of what that past is, I’d love to delve deeper into her background because I feel like she has some great stories to tell.

Read our review of ‘A Traitor in Whitehall’ by Julia Kelly.

While writing A Traitor in Whitehall, did any part of the story or characters surprise you?
When I sat down to write A Traitor in Whitehall, I don’t think I had any idea what I was in for. From the very first chapter, Evelyne sprung to life almost fully formed on the page. It felt a bit like she was a runaway train and I was just along for the ride. I think a lot of that comes from the fact that this is my first book written in first-person POV, and I really wanted to make Evelyne’s voice shine through. She’s a determined, curious, intelligent woman who is also a loyal friend. I hope readers will fall in love with her the way that I have!

What’s up next for you—any tidbits you want to share with readers?
I am currently working on the second book in the Parisian Orphan series, which has been such fun to write. The second season of the The History Quill Podcast, which I co-host with the historical novelist Theo Brun, is also underway. The podcast, which is all about writing historical novels, features interviews with well-known and debut authors. It’s been such a pleasure to speak with people who are so generous sharing their experiences with the craft and business of publishing.

Photo of Julia Kelly by Scott Bottles.

Julia Kelly’s first historical mystery, A Traitor in Whitehall, takes readers into Winston Churchill’s secret underground headquarters during World War II.

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