Roy Miller's Blog, page 279

Please Don’t Buy Books Just to Send to Trump

By now, it’s been more or less proven that Donald Trump doesn’t read. Which some—probably more than a few of you reading this space, but who knows—would say is pretty embarrassing for the president. On the other hand, Donald Trump’s reign has so far been surprisingly good for certain books, as you may have noticed, although of course he promises to be very bad for arts (and other human pursuits) in the long run. Now, a new campaign, organized by Aaron Hamburger and Stacie Whitaker of the Facebook group Leaders Are Readers, is calling for concerned literary citizens to “Bury the White House in Books” on Valentine’s Day—that is, to buy books that they think Donald Trump should read, wrap them, write messages in them, and then send them to the White House, en masse. Happy Valentine’s Day!

“All our recent presidents, Republican and Democratic, have been readers,” Aaron Hamburger told the Huffington Post. “Part of being a leader is knowing what it means to sit in the audience, how to listen, and there’s nothing more humbling and informing than reading, taking in the voice and consciousness of someone else in such a deep way. … This is very much a movement to stand proudly and declare what we are for, namely a republic of letters rather than fear.”

But as much as I agree with the sentiment here, this probably isn’t a very useful tactic. As the Huffington Post’s Claire Fallon points out, sending books to the White House is not going to actually do much. “Neither Trump nor his staff will likely take reading recommendations from a campaign flooding the White House’s mail system with books about Frederick Douglass and the environment,” she writes. “But it could be a serious annoyance.”

Well, sure. But we should be shooting for better than “a serious annoyance.” And it’s clear that intellectualism is not valued in this administration, so it doesn’t make any sense to me to act like it does. This president does not value literature, or journalism, or history. Why does anyone think they can make him understand anything with books? All this man understands is television and Twitter.

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At any rate, there are much better things to do with those brand new books than annoy the White House mail room interns and fill their recycling bins (unless—does Trump even believe in recycling? It seems like the kind of thing he would blame China for) with literature.

For instance: why not send a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale—or some other timely book—to a relative who voted for Trump, with a long, heartfelt note inside as to why you think they might enjoy reading it? They are much more likely to take you up on it than anyone in the administration. Hell, why not send a copy of whatever book you’ve recently read and loved to that relative, politically relevant or no? You’ve got a couple years to convince them, after all.

The “Bury the White House in Books” page mentions that these extra book purchases will support the publishing industry and local bookstores—but I have to say that “the publishing industry” isn’t necessarily worthy of your support (it depends on which arm you’re looking at), and purchases will obviously only support local bookstores if people are actually buying their books there—but instead of throwing away your hard-earned money and your hard-earned books on a worthless, illiterate idiot like Donald Trump, why not donate them to a local prison book program? Or to under-resourced libraries? Perhaps your local homeless shelter? Hey, it seems like public schools might be needing some help soon. Buying and sending books to any of these places would be much better and more useful than sending them to Trump just to try to make a scene.

I know, I know. Especially in the current climate, making a scene can be pretty alluring. After all, that’s what the president does every day, and scenes can, in fact, be useful forms of protest. But in this case, it just sort of seems like a waste of good books.

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The Dog Ate My Homework

In an ironic twist, a dog really ate your homework. When you try to explain this to your teacher she says, “Come on, you can do better than that excuse.” Instead of arguing, you take that as a challenge and come up with an elaborate story as to what happened to your homework. Let us hear it.

Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.

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Ali Smith: By the Book

What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?

“Origins and Elements,” poems by the Orkney film-poet Margaret Tait; well, any of her books — she’s a maverick, quietly seminal in both the film form and the written form. You can see some of her films online in the National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive, but the poetry is harder to track down. It’s unique, conversational, visionary, beat, thrawn and thoughtful. Or there’s “O Caledonia,” a novel by Elspeth Barker, a sparky, funny work of genius about class, romanticism, social tradition and literary tradition, and one of the best least-known novels of the 20th century, I reckon.

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Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?

This question just made my brain pixelate, and now the inside of my head’s a roaring celebration. That first fragment of a second, this is who came through the door: Toni Morrison, Nicola Barker, Jan Verwoert, Margaret Atwood, Giorgio Agamben, Kate Atkinson, Alasdair Gray, Helen Oyeyemi, Laurie Anderson, Marina Warner, Elif Shafak, Kamila Shamsie, Paul Virilio. . . . That’s just the start of the party.

What do you read when you’re working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing?

I don’t avoid anything. If I’m working on a book I keep the weekends free, if I can, for reading, and I choose what to read more or less randomly — though there’s no such thing as reading randomly, really, since one of the gifts of reading is that the satisfactions and the astonishments of serendipity always kick in sooner or later.

What moves you most in a work of literature?

The earth moves, for me, when the read comes together on all its levels, from syntax to instinctual platelet level. Also always really exciting to me is the crossing-over the written work does into the other art forms, prose into poetry into music into choreography into visual — text into textural.

Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

I like reading pretty much everything.

How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or simultaneously? Morning or night?

Well, I love all the ways of reading. The more the better. But I naturally prefer the form of the book. We’ve loved it for centuries, and no wonder: Look at it; its always-opening-to-something, its two wings, its two sides making one form, its act of opening us as we open it — you can’t “open” a screen like you can literally open a book. And a book always holds the reminder of the organic world, the trees that went to make it — and the word “spine” was originally used for the spine of the book because of the spine of the creatures whose skins were once used to bind books, the place where the skin folded over the creature’s own spine. That’s how close to the process of life, death, time, growth and oxygen the form of the book is.

How do you organize your books?

Alphabetically on the shelves, haphazardly in the little ziggurats round the house.

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What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

I’ve thought about this, and I really can’t tell. It’d depend on the people and their preconceptions. My shelves themselves haven’t any — preconceptions, I mean.

What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?

A first edition of Plath’s (or Victoria Lucas’s) “The Bell Jar.” It’s been well loved in its life, it’s fairly barreled and slopy, and there are the remnants of what looks like Chinese takeaway on some of the pages. But opening that package and finding it there was the closest I suspect I’ll ever come to being given a sports car or a pony.

Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain?

Emma Woodhouse (for being both heroine and anti-).

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

Because I was the youngest, at the back of four older siblings, as a child I read as if I was 10 years older than I really was, which means I came to children’s literature late, read a lot of the children’s classics in my 30s and 40s, and read writers like Joyce and Orwell and Swift as a child sort of by chance, because they were on the (brilliant) Scottish secondary-school curriculum and happened to be in the books cupboard above the bed when I was 7 or 8. It also means I’ve never really been able to see the division between the child reading state and the adult reading state, which is probably why I love Tove Jansson’s works, which are themselves near-interchangeables; her fiction for adults written with a clarity, openness, foresight and refusal to compromise on the darks and lights, all preserved from her children’s fiction, and her children’s fiction imbued with an adult philosophy, experience, wisdom, generosity, forgiveness.

If you could require the prime minister to read one book, what would it be? The American president?

I’ll give them both “King Lear.” It’s good and prescient about divided kingdoms. I’ll add a copy of “Macbeth” (“the Scottish play”) as a special Scottish gift for your president. And in case they don’t rate Shakespeare, or think “Shakespeare, yawn, that was then, this is now. . . ,” I’ll send Mrs. May a copy of José Saramago’s “The Stone Raft,” a book about what happens when a piece of the Iberian Peninsula breaks off mainland Europe and floats off by itself, and for your president, I’ll add a cubit to his name with “Trumpet,” by Jackie Kay, a novel whose humanism, humor and vision demolish anyone’s urge to think they’ve got the right to decide about, categorize or dismiss other human beings.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

I’d never organize a literary dinner party. The very thought. No, instead I’ll phone the great 20th-century photographer (and superb writer) Lee Miller, up in heaven — she became a gourmet surrealist cook in her later years, and I’d love to try that bright blue fish dish she made — and I’ll ask her to invite Katherine Mansfield, Colette and Simone de Beauvoir. And we’ll need a musician or two. Stéphane Grappelli. Nina Simone. Ask Harpo Marx to bring his harp. I’ll bring the Talisker and sit shyly in the corner with George Mackay Brown.

Of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite or the most personally meaningful?

“There But for The.”

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

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Whatever it was, I’ll try and finish it later. Sometimes books don’t deliver till their very last pages.

Whom would you want to write your life story?

Sebastian Barry, who invariably grants that all our ordinary lived lives are courageous, warm, messy, lyrical, rich in their poverty and risky, grand and small and symphonic. Or Lydia Davis, who’ll write the perfect three lines that do all the work of a 3,000-page biography.

What do you plan to read next?

Everything I can.

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What Remains When Your First Language Fades Away

My love for the English language began early and with a fierceness that I still can’t explain. I made clumsy attempts to read my older brother’s English textbooks, relentlessly studying words and struggling to pronounce sentences that had no meaning to me. I translated song lyrics and took every English class offered in school. In college, I realized I didn’t have a passion for languages per se—I did study French and Spanish but didn’t find them nearly as captivating, nor did they come easily to me; it was just the English language that I found to be so appealing.

I moved to America in my twenties, leaving behind a country that had just experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and was in the midst of German reunification efforts. In the years that followed, I worked as a freelance translator, was exposed to American culture, and exclusively communicated in English. Breaking into literary translations became my ultimate goal. I lobbied editors and translated lengthy samples from German into English in an attempt to convince publishers to take a risk. This never panned out, and while I continued to work on commercial projects and occasional non-fiction books, I eventually decided to tell my own stories.

I completely immersed myself in English. I read, wrote, and enrolled in writing classes, and something peculiar began to occur: my native language drifted off into the distance. It happened in stages, but there came a point I could no longer deny what was going on. I’d stare at a word, no longer sure of its root origin, and errors snuck into my translation work—there were misplaced split verbs, improperly ordered sentences, numerous incorrect prepositions, and words I couldn’t assign to either English or German. I had become hesitant in conversations as my brain blocked me from retrieving a word; I self-corrected and paused often and ended up sounding disfluent. There I was, sounding like a foreigner speaking my native language.

I struggled with an explanation—after all, I knew people who had gone decades without speaking or hearing their native language, yet they retained the ability to speak it easily. Why had I begun losing fluency within a few years? I imagined my attempts to hold onto my German as scooping up water with my cupped hands—no matter how tightly I gripped, the water trickled through my fingers. Could it be that nothing about me had changed, yet my language was slowly disappearing?

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Linguists call this verbal decay “language attrition”—a highly common phenomenon, it describes the loss of a second language when it is insufficiently used. Even though there was a logical explanation, a question remained: if my native language continued to decline, what would happen to the part of me that was rooted in it? My entire childhood, all those years roaming the countryside, the hundreds of books I had read, my love of fairy tales, would it all disappear into thin air eventually?

In 2004, I was reminded of the depth with which language impacts us when the Goethe Institute asked the public to submit what they believed to be the most beautiful German word. Writers, film directors, artists, and language experts made up a jury who deliberated over thousands of submitted words. The winner was Habseligkeiten, (from the words haben, to have, and Seligkeit, happiness or salvation), which refers to one’s earthly possessions and the state of bliss they call forth. According to the jury, the juxtaposition evoked an appreciation for small and little things of meager value while exhibiting a capacity for gratitude.

I conjured up the first twenty-some years of my life and discovered a word that would have been my first choice if I had been on that jury, a word too specific to have an English equivalent—a name for the feeling of being alone in the woods. Waldeinsamkeit, (Wald meaning forest and Einsamkeit meaning loneliness or solitude) is a word considered untranslatable and, even though some words come close—contemplation or the phrase being at one with the universe—they all fail to get to the core of a place that, to some, might be a mere collection of trees. For me, this word evokes nights spent listening to my mother sing traditional folk- and fairytales and summers spent wandering through the forests around my hometown. The forest spirits of German folklore reside within me, like some heathen bloodline I can’t deny. There is a quote by German Biologist H.B. Behm that encapsulates this sentiment: “And a time came to pass when man began to pray among the rustling treetops. That’s when the German soul was born.”

English may not be the language that formed me, but it is the language of the world I have chosen to live in. I am American in almost every way; I pledged allegiance to the American flag in front of a judge with hundreds of immigrants after the long and exhaustive process of naturalization. However, there are parts of my past that I can’t shake—and don’t care to.

What remains of my native language comprises my soul, and I will always hold the lullabies, the folk tales, and the stories of times past that I grew up on dear. Though my fluency in German has faded, it is still deeply engrained into my identity. I might hesitate often and stumble through a conversation, I might forget words, but part of me remembers something much bigger. The conscious mind reads and processes Waldeinsamkeit, but the unconscious one evokes and calls forth an entire past and the experience of a language. Defunct from a lack of use, sure, but never truly forgotten.

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Writing Nature in Fiction

My debut crime fiction novel, The Wild Inside (Atria), takes place in and around the unforgettable and often haunting Glacier National Park in northwest Montana. When I was doing research, I met someone who had worked on a wolverine project in the park. We had a lengthy, fascinating discussion about the animal, its habitat, and the politics of studying it. As we were wrapping up, I apologized for taking his time for something like fiction—something created from my mind and not scientific; he smiled and said, “I’ve come to think that perhaps fiction is the best way to deal with some of the social and environmental issues of our area.”

His statement stuck with me, and I began to consider my role as a crime fiction writer who often writes about the natural world. I revised my ideas about those who tend to nature, deciding that nature has many more servants than I initially thought. There are those who do hands-on work—biologists, farmers, wildlife rescuers—and those who do indirect work, such as accountants and law enforcement specialists at the Department of the Interior. Some folks volunteer: activists and conservationists who lobby on the environment’s behalf. There are journalists, environmental lawyers, politicians, professors, teachers... The list goes on. No matter what their duties are, most understand the need to tend to the planet in one way or another.

But crime fiction? Well, Mother Nature is apparently an equal-opportunity enlister. Although I don’t write crime fiction primarily to serve her and my novels are not eco-thrillers, I do find that when writing books set under the big sky of northwest Montana and in the commanding Glacier National Park, the landscape and environmental issues weave their way into the story.

Most people sense that if we disconnect from the natural world, along with income inequality and other economic matters of our time, the future might be quite frightening. In Montana, the natural world is a weighty player in the economy. Economic hardships are brought on by closing saw mills, lumber plants, and other crucial industrial centers, all against a backdrop of significant environmental challenges: parched farmland, melting glaciers, forests decimated by drought and beetles, fire seasons, and endangered species. We have striking contrasts, with 10,000-sq.-ft. vacation homes on hillsides near trendy mountain towns, just down the road from trailer parks and small towns facing economic failure, often plagued by drugs.

Driving to Glacier Park means going through areas, such as the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, where opportunities for employment and economic security are scarce. People want to understand these issues, but following the news and listening to dueling experts is not always the best way. Sometimes it’s easier to learn while being entertained. So, for a crime writer, these mountain communities nestled beside the wilderness provide ample material, and I feel that I have a privilege in sharing a picture of the interdependencies between our communities and the natural world with my fiction. In some ways, it’s an opportunity to slide the economic and environmental issues past statistics, charts, and political ideologies, and to lift the reader above the dreaded sense of impotency to the very human experience of understanding through imagination.

Don’t get me wrong: there are no easy solutions presented in my world of fiction, no perfect cures for economic or environmental woes. There is simply the cultivation of our senses—of our ears and eyes toward natural processes—and a humble hope that readers will sharpen their awareness on the most basic level, leading to an understanding that our connection to the Earth is essential and real, and that we must remain open to what Mother Nature whispers and even shouts out.

Sound lofty and political? It really isn’t. It’s just good ol’ conflict, and for a crime fiction writer, conflict is the sacred fountain we drink from, the streams we enter to breathe life into our characters. And the characters in my neck of the woods just happen to be breathing the pine-scented mountain air.

If we writers can give a glimpse of a grizzly bear—maybe illuminate its hibernation process, describe where it travels and what it eats—then we’ve shown the creature itself, released from its cage of statistics. This is when the heart of the natural world begins to beat on the page—begins to beat in all of us, even if we live in concrete, far from the woods.

Christine Carbo is a crime fiction writer and small business owner in northwest Montana.

A version of this article appeared in the 06/15/2015 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Writing Nature in Fiction

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New Rushdie, Two Grishams from RH This Year

Two different Random House divisions will be releasing a new Salman Rushdie novel and two new John Grisham thrillers later this year.

Little Random will publish Rushdie’s The Golden House in September. According to RH, in the novel, “Rushdie weaves together a gripping story of life over the last eight years: the rise of the Tea Party, Gamergate and identity politics; the backlash against political correctness; and the insurgence of a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain sporting makeup and colored hair."

Will Murphy, RH executive editor, acquired U.S. rights from Andrew Wylie at the Wylie Agency. Murphy called The Golden House “astounding, timely, and extraordinarily moving.”

Over at Doubleday, the company said it will publish Grisham’s 30th novel, Camino Island, on June 5, which will be followed by an as yet unnamed thriller in October. Both books have an announced first printing of 1.5 million copies.

“We are thrilled to be publishing two books by John Grisham in 2017,” said Sonny Mehta, chairman and editor in chief of Knopf. He called Camino Island “a caper of the highest form.” The second book, Mehta said, “is one of John’s classic, suspense-filled legal thrillers and we’ll have more to share soon.”

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Happy 150th Birthday to Laura Ingalls Wilder!

In the WD backpage humor column Platforms of Yore, we dream up the social media accounts of classic authors desperate to build their online platforms. Today, January 7, 2017, is the 150th birthday of Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder—so it only seems fitting that we remember her through her imagined tweets, Facebook posts and Instagram photos, courtesy of the September 2016 Writer’s Digest.

SHARE A LAUGH: Coming soon, the Official Online Home of GEORGE ORWELL. Have a funny idea for this author’s imagined social network? Email your tweets, Facebook posts/threads or Instagram pics to wdsubmissions@fwmedia.com with “Platforms of Yore” in the subject line, or tweet @WritersDigest using the hashtag #platformsofyore. You could see your post (and your name) in the next issue of Writer’s Digest!

PHOTO CREDITS: HORSE WAGON © SHUTTERSTOCK: MICHAELA STEJSKALOVA; OIL LAMP © SHUTTERSTOCK: LINCOLN ROGERS 

 

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Elizabeth Warren’s book on middle class is coming in April

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—Metropolitan Books via AP

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has a new book coming out this spring, one that continues her battle for progressive economics.

Warren’s “This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class” will be published April 18, Henry Holt and Co. told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

“This Fight Is Our Fight” will be released through Holt’s Metropolitan Books imprint. It will offer a mini-history of the American middle class, from the New Deal of the 1930s to what the publisher calls President Donald Trump’s “phony promises” that endanger it now. It will also include “candid accounts of her battles in the Senate, vivid stories about her life and work, and powerful descriptions of the experiences of working Americans,” along with a plan for advancing progressive goals.

“Washington works great for the rich and powerful who can hire armies of lawyers and lobbyists, but it is not working very well for everyone else,” Warren, who began the book well before Trump’s election, said in a statement. “America’s once-solid middle class is on the ropes, and now Donald Trump and his administration seem determined to deliver the knockout punch. At this perilous moment in our country’s history, it’s time to fight back — and I’m looking for more people to join me.”

Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts and prominent liberal voice in the Senate, has written 10 previous books. Her 2014 release, “A Fighting Chance,” was a best-seller. For her new book, she was represented by Washington attorney Robert Barnett, whose other clients include former President Barack Obama and Warren’s colleague Sen. Al Franken, who has a memoir coming out in May. Warren will donate a portion of her author proceeds to a handful of food banks based in Massachusetts, including The Greater Boston Food Bank and the Merrimack Valley Food Bank.

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Katie Kitamura on Ambition, Morality, and Writing Ugly

Katie Kitamura seems to live the dream: Her previous novels, Gone to the Forest and The Longshot were both recipients of awards. She’s won a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship and published fiction, essays, and criticism in places like The Guardian, Granta, and The New York Times Book Review. Born in California, she graduated from Princeton and holds a PhD in literature from the London Consortium. She was once a serious ballet dancer and has a serious interest in mixed martial arts. She’s married to the novelist Hari Kunzru.

On top of all that, Kitamura’s new novel, A Separation, has received raves from fellow writers, from Karl Ove Knausgaard to Jenny Offill to Rivka Galchen. A spare and suspenseful story of a woman who heads to Greece to see her faithless husband and put an end to their marriage turns seamlessly into a tale of murder and betrayal—but this book is no whodunit. More like a who-thought-it. Its gripping, dreamlike quality recalls the recent work of Rachel Cusk, Claire Messud, and Han Yang, while being wholly Kitamura’s own. I spoke by telephone with the talented Kitamura, who was at her home in New York.

Bethanne Patrick: Do you want to talk about politics? Or are things too heavy?

Katie Kitamura: I’d think I’d collapse. It’s relentless. For the first time in my life I dread looking at the front page.

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BP: Let’s talk about being ambitious, as a reader—and as a writer.

KK: I think being ambitious as a reader is always going to be the most important thing. It’s very hard to be ambitious as a writer if you’re not ambitious as a reader.

I think almost every fiction writer I know would say you don’t want to start out writing something if you think you can do it. As you grow, you have more confidence that you can explore something, that that process is even good for your writing, but if you know you can write it, it’s not worth writing in some way. There are scenes I knew I wanted to write, and I didn’t know if I could sustain them. One scene, where the narrator is watching Stefano and Maria having their conversation—I knew I wanted to see if I could stretch that scene out, but I didn’t know if it was going to work. One of the great pleasures of writing is that you try something, and if it doesn’t work, you just cut it. It’s fine if you sort of fail. That’s part of the process

BP: In one interview, you said “Pleasantness is the enemy of good fiction.” Discuss!

KK: Some writers have this idea of wanting to be liked by the reader, begging the reader to like them, but if a reader likes you in some way—you, as opposed to your writing—it sets you up for this kind of constant seduction. That can make for wonderful fiction, for instance, when it’s part of the authorial plan, like Nabokov with Lolita. But it’s not the only kind of fiction, and I don’t want a surface-level likability. I’m not running for President! I don’t want my readers to want to have a beer with me! I want whatever feeling they have, on reading my work, to be a feeling towards the piece, and not me.

Let the book do what the book needs to do. Don’t insert yourself too much. There are many writers I do admire who have strong authorial presence, and they write wonderful books, but for me, if I’m writing from the position of wanting to be liked or to not offend, then I just can’t write. It’s too crippling. It makes me too self conscious.

BP: I love what you’ve said about the best novels often containing awkward prose. Sometimes a bad sentence can say more than a perfect paragraph—could you elaborate?

KK: I believe in really getting into the muck of writing, getting waist deep in it. I completely understand beautifully written pull quotes, but I do find them slightly puzzling; in a way style becomes less and less interesting to me as I read and write. A series of perfectly executed metaphors is fine, but not at the heart of what I look for in a piece of writing. One reason I’m suspicious of that perfectly executed prose style is that I feel it can become a tic and a way of avoiding the heart of what you’re really trying to say. You can find yourself relying on little linguistic tricks. For me, that was becoming a way of avoiding the complexities I wanted to succeed in presenting. If it’s messy it’s fine, if it’s ugly it’s fine, as long as what I’m expressing is what I want to express.

BP: You’ve said that you prefer “morally fantastic” fiction. Could you explain?

KK: I’m very interested in setting up a situation with a moral question at the heart of it. I’m a relatively polite person, but to find the elasticity of the scene, of that situation where things are far beyond polite, is really interesting to me as a fiction writer. How people who think of themselves as good people behave in bad ways. My French translator told me, “I find your characters really unlikable!”

BP: What, for you, is the relationship between subject matter and prose style?

KK: “Your prose style changes with each book,” Knausgaard told me. I think it really does, which is maybe not the most productive way of working, because I have to find the voice for the story before I can really produce much prose. For A Separation, I initially wrote an entire draft in third person, then put it in a drawer for two years. I’ve never looked at that draft again. An imagination that you can’t control, a surfeit of emotion that you can’t address, leads to being uncertain, to meandering digressive endless speculation and long sentences. That’s important; a book about looking and searching has to be reflected in its prose

BP: Does that have anything to do with the exceedingly British feel of A Separation on the page?

KK: First, in terms of references, there’s a lot of European fiction that has a kind of unresolved mystery, often an act of extreme violence, at the center of the novel—I’m thinking, for example, of Duras. So that’s one way I think my book “feels” different. But in terms of specifically British, well, I lived in England for almost a decade. I went to college when I was young and moved from there to London. I think the city you first lived in that’s not your home, that really marks you in some way. I think there are plenty of British usages of language in the text that are deliberate, but others are not. That’s just how I use language.

BP: Reviews have already mentioned a murder in this book. I have to tell you the announcement of that in Chapter Seven really was a shock—and I am not easily surprised.

KK: Obviously I always knew it was going to happen and that it was going to be the split in the book. I had in mind No Country for Old Men; things like that can be such a shock when we understand certain narrative conventions! He really sets you up to expect genre, then, boom. It’s important to me that my narrator comes out of this with a sense of guilt, whether it’s earned, or not. It’s important to me that the book feels open ended and without a fixed solution.

BP: Did you spend time in Greece for this novel?

KK: I did spend time in Greece, but it wasn’t specifically to write this book. Recently I tried to work out the dates; it’s quite a long time ago, but I spent three weeks in Mani, where A Separation takes place. The hotel in it is an actual place, and I think that’s where the first seeds of this novel were planted. It was brief but intense, and it’s really interesting to unpick how books get put together. When I finished the book recently, I thought it was about jealousy and infidelity. However, when I turned back to my time in Mani, I realized the book is about grief. When I was there, in Greece, my father was in a remission from the cancer that killed him seven years ago. The dread I had of his impending loss seeped into the landscape, and it’s in this book, too.

BP: On the surface this seems like the least political of your books, but . . .

KK: It probably is. In a funny way it’s the most personal of my books, possibly because it’s the first time I’ve used first person. But politics is in our everyday life. There’s a lot in the book that’s specifically about class, particularly in the characters of the in-laws; the politics is in facets of the central characters rather than a set of ideas.

That was absolutely why it had to be first person for me. I knew that what was important to me was that it was a woman who was narrating the story, choosing the frame through which the story is told, choosing the depiction of the central male character. The narrator is unnamed, a presence that’s entirely voice. She’s almost a kind of disembodied character, and almost a kind of ghostly character.

BP: In a first-person narration, you do a lot of telling, rather than showing.

KK: Absolutely, you can’t get away from the telling. She reveals herself in terms of what she doesn’t say, but the fact that she is controlling the narrative is important. She speaks from a position of such deep uncertainty about who she is, about who she was to her husband. That sense of shifting ground is part of the grief narrative.

BP: She can’t get away from her own narrative; there’s a sense of interiority combined with claustrophobia.

KK: [My novel] wasn’t going to be driven by more conventional plot, its tension derives entirely from dread and claustrophobia, from mood. It was very important to me to depict the nature of obsession. Her imagination is unruly and she cannot control it. One of the tensions between my narrator and her mother-in-law is that the mother-in-law is a survivor, someone who is capable of shutting down her imagination and getting on with it and moving on, too. My narrator cannot.

BP: Instead of asking you “what’s next,” let me ask what you’re aiming towards. Does that make sense? Is it answerable?

KK: I’m working on another novel. When I was in my twenties I had a lot of time to experiment, not just in writing, but in collaborations—doing things that weren’t part of a book, just feeding myself with very varied input. Now I have two children and a book deadline and teaching, but I miss that dead time when you’re sitting around wondering what to work on next. I would like to preserve that, it’s the kind of elasticity that time has in college, for example. I actually think being bored is very, very useful to the creative process, yet nowadays I’m never bored. Trying to carve that out is a challenge—but that’s the dream.

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Cut to the Core: Education Reform and Libraries

Another school year is drawing to a close, but amid the celebrations and public festivities, melancholy looms over the library profession. In recent years, information professionals working in all sectors of the library field have had to fight harder and harder to show they occupy a vital place in society. But the “who needs librarians when we have the Internet?” crowd is devastating school libraries in particular, despite mounting evidence that links the presence of certified school librarians with student achievement. It’s time to recognize how valuable libraries are.

How bad has it gotten? In New York City, the number of school libraries has plummeted over the past decade. According to a recent article in Education Week, there are now fewer than 700 school libraries in N.Y.C. schools, compared to 1,500 in 2005. On average, there is now one school librarian for every 3,400 students in the city. And, surprisingly, charter schools, which were designed to improve education, are leading the charge to cut school libraries. With so much talk about education reform, we have to wonder whether some so-called reformers understand how essential a good librarian is to a child’s education, or what a librarian even does.

The List Is Long

The soul of a school resides in its library. Certified school librarians teach valuable information literacy skills. We nurture the foundations of pleasure reading within students. We assist administrators and fellow faculty members, teaching our teachers, and often overseeing valuable professional-development programs for faculty and staff at schools. And we seamlessly transition among our roles supporting students, teachers, and administrators.

Navigating through a school librarian’s typical work day requires skills learned on the job and through years of advanced schooling. Just as states require classroom teachers to have a master’s degree to be certified, school librarians must also obtain an advanced degree. And our unique skills prepare us for a range of essential tasks, including teaching information literacy, delivering captivating book talks, finding and introducing new technology and cultivating technology skills, reinforcing solid research skills, supervising and engaging students during noninstructional periods, and, of course, developing and maintaining a collection of materials to meet student needs.

School librarians are not a luxury, but central to a good education. We disseminate knowledge and offer the support necessary to make student learning experiences successful, and positive. For example, beyond our teaching tasks, we also deliver a careful form of book selection called bibliotherapy, a type of assistance that puts appropriate books into the hands of children and adolescents struggling to navigate the complex pressures and problems that complicate their diverse lives. Often, it is the school librarian who becomes the confidant and first line of defense for a student in crisis, and who initiates professional intervention for that child. There are conversations that are easier to initiate by discussing the actions of a troubled character in a novel, or by recognizing when a student identifies with a plot line that may mirror that child’s real-life difficulties.

And our jobs do not end after the last class. School librarians convene after the school day ends to host student and faculty book clubs. We coordinate author visits, both physical and virtual. We work individually with students who need additional research and writing assistance. Unfortunately, as the 2014–2015 school year winds down, certified school librarians are battling for the chance to keep these roles.

Invest in Us

Education reform has become a prominent issue with the introduction of the Common Core, and many reformers propose to run our schools like Fortune 500 companies. Of course, a school is not a business, and taking a CEO-like approach to education is not necessarily the best way to approach it.

Still, if you were to look at all the tasks a school librarian executes through the lens of a corporate manager, wouldn’t having someone with such core skills strike you as indisputably valuable? Wouldn’t you invest in someone like that? As the eduction debate continues, it’s time we bring school libraries back into the discussion, and time we recognize that school librarians are a critical part of our education future.

Margaux DelGuidice is a librarian at Garden City High School in New York and also works as a youth-services librarian at the Freeport Memorial Library.

Rose Luna is a librarian at Freeport High School in New York and also works as a bilingual reference librarian at the Freeport Memorial Library.

A version of this article appeared in the 06/22/2015 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Cut to the Core

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