“Silence Became My Mother Tongue”: A Conversation with Sulaiman Addonia, by Anderson Tepper

Interviews Photo of Sulaiman Addonia by Alexander Meeus. For me, one of the most astounding books of this past year—which may have slipped your attention due to the pandemic—was Silence Is My Mother Tongue, the second novel by Ethiopian Eritrean writer Sulaiman Addonia (@sulaimanaddonia). Published last September by Graywolf Press, the novel is just now beginning to get the recognition it deserves: it was recently shortlisted for the Firecracker Award for Independently Published Literature and is a 2021 LAMBDA Literary Award finalist. Set in a refugee camp in Sudan, the novel defies expectations—shimmering with sensual detail, it charts the daily encounters and erotic dreams of an extraordinary cast of characters, with the inseparable siblings Saba and her mute brother, Hagos, at its center. Of course, since war erupted in Ethiopia’s Tigray region this past winter, Addonia’s work has only taken on more resonance. “I have been looking at the pictures of refugees fleeing Tigray and waiting outside the United Nations refugee agency office at Hamdayet in Sudan,” Addonia wrote in a New York Times editorial in late November, “the place through which my family and I passed decades ago, on our way to a refugee camp further inland. I was struck by the eyes of young children. Their gazes retreat and shift, as if their wide eyes have already become the trenches into which they will hide their childhood.” We spoke by email—Addonia... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'

[ World Literature Today | 2021-05-18 13:43:22 UTC ]
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“Imagining More Transgender Visibility in Translation”: A Conversation with Ari Larissa Heinrich, by Veronica Esposito

Interviews Ari Larissa Heinrich / Photo by Tara Pixley Ari Larissa Heinrich is the translator of Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre (New York Review Books) and Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes (forthcoming from Columbia University Press). They... Continue reading at World Literature Today

[ World Literature Today | 2020-10-27 22:09:23 UTC ]
More news stories like this | News stories tagged with: #liu cixin #three-body problem #anglophone readers #first novel


Unsafe Harbors: A Conversation with Nadia Terranova

ON JULY 2 of this year, I interviewed the author Nadia Terranova at her mother’s house in Santa Marinella, Italy, on a Zoom call from my apartment in Santa Monica, California. Back in 2015, I’d written a review of her first novel ​Gli anni al contrario (​The Years in Reverse​) and we’d met for... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books

[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-10-27 17:00:01 UTC ]
More news stories like this | News stories tagged with: #zoom call #santa monica #first novel


Writing with a Humble Pen: A Conversation with Tayari Jones, by Avery Holmes

Interviews Photo by Beowulf Sheehan / Courtesy of www.tayarijones.com Tayari Jones is a New York Times best-selling author from Atlanta, Georgia. Her most recent novel, An American Marriage, won the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Jones has been... Continue reading at World Literature Today

[ World Literature Today | 2020-10-22 14:14:35 UTC ]
More news stories like this | News stories tagged with: #oklahoma city #short-story collection #small town #north carolina #book festival #best-selling author


The Butch Lesbian Sci-Fi Aesthetic: A Conversation With Tamsyn Muir

TAMSYN MUIR’S DEBUT NOVEL, Gideon the Ninth, the first in her Locked Tomb trilogy, exploded into the world to universal critical acclaim last year. The series doesn’t fit nearly into the castles-versus-spaceships division that characterizes much of mainstream science fiction and fantasy. It has... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books

[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-10-21 17:00:28 UTC ]
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In Conversation with Actress and Audiobook Narrator Yetide Badaki

Nigerian-American writer, producer, and actress Yetide Badaki, well known for acting in the TV series This Is Us and American Gods, comes from a family of storytellers. She recalls sitting by the fire as a youth and listening to her elders. “Storytelling is such a part of just being,” she says.... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2020-10-20 08:48:10 UTC ]
More news stories like this | News stories tagged with: #tv series #literary hub #audiobook


Don DeLillo’s ‘The Silence’ is an absurdist look at our technology dependence

“The Silence” feels like Apocalypse Lite for people who don’t want to get their hands dirty. Continue reading at The Washington Post

[ The Washington Post | 2020-10-12 10:08:43 UTC ]
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The Magic of Plot and Catharsis: A Conversation with Smith Henderson and Jon Marc Smith

LET’S DISPENSE WITH the small surprises up front. The latest outing from Smith Henderson, acclaimed author of what others might call literary fiction — his award-winning 2014 debut, Fourth of July Creek — is indeed a thriller. And it’s not a solo endeavor — he’s teamed up with a friend, Jon Marc... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books

[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-10-11 12:30:47 UTC ]
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HarperCollins snaps up Beresiner's Mother Project

HarperCollins has snapped up The Mother Project by journalist and Sunday Times Style columnist Sophie Beresiner. Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2020-10-08 00:56:24 UTC ]
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The Times drops the mother lode on Trump’s taxes

Yesterday, the New York Times reporters Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig, and Mike McIntire—and if you recognize the byline you’ll know where this sentence is headed—published a mammoth story based on recent tax returns that President Trump filed with the Internal Revenue Service, records that the... Continue reading at Columbia Journalism Review

[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2020-09-28 12:10:20 UTC ]
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Little Tiger scoops mother and daughter middle-grade series

Little Tiger is to publish "a fresh take on the witch school genre" middle-grade series by mother and daughter partnership Honor and Perdita Cargill.  Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2020-09-24 21:22:22 UTC ]
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Embracing the Wildness of Diaspora: A Conversation with K-Ming Chang

My correspondence with K-Ming Chang began with fan mail. I had recently read her flash fiction story Gloria in Split Lip—a knife-sharp story about queerness, shame, and faith—and instantly devoured the rest of her fiction and her poetry, moved by the possibilities in her writing. A Kundiman... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2020-09-24 08:48:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this | News stories tagged with: #k-ming chang #recently read #literary award


PRH Opens ‘The Conversation’ To ‘Sustain Antiracist Engagement’

Penguin Random House launches The Conversation, a hub of content collections 'to combat racism and end racial inequities'—meant for families, educators, and businesses. The post PRH Opens ‘The Conversation’ To ‘Sustain Antiracist Engagement’ appeared first on Publishing Perspectives. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives

[ Publishing Perspectives | 2020-09-22 19:17:06 UTC ]
More news stories like this | News stories tagged with: #combat racism #penguin random house


Surviving the Discomfort: A Conversation with Claudia Rankine

CLAUDIA RANKINE’S Just Us: An American Conversation completes a vital trilogy that includes Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Rankine’s fluid artistry is complex and human. Twenty-one intimate, and collaborative, essays, in verso and recto format, swerve... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books

[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-09-21 12:30:23 UTC ]
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Man in the Maze: A Conversation with Robert Silverberg

THE LONG AND VARIED career of science fiction author Robert Silverberg can almost be viewed as a microcosm of the genre’s development over the past seven decades. Starting out in the world of fandom, Silverberg edited a popular zine in the early 1950s, then turned to professional writing during... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books

[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-09-18 15:00:52 UTC ]
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‘We’re Looking at a New Cold War’: A Conversation with Daniel Yergin

Daniel Yergin is a highly respected authority on energy, international politics, and economics, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, and Shattered Peace:... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2020-09-18 08:47:31 UTC ]
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Darley Anderson opens illustration arm

The Darley Anderson Agency has opened an illustration arm that will represent artists across both children's and adult lists.  Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2020-09-16 13:51:54 UTC ]
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“Two Beings Entwined”: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of Conflict and Healing, by Renee H. Shea

Interviews   Harlan Margaret Van Cao and Lan Cao / Courtesy of Penguin Random House Family in Six Tones: A Refugee Mother, an American Daughter (Viking, 2020) is a memoir written in alternating narrative chapters between Lan Cao and Harlan... Continue reading at World Literature Today

[ World Literature Today | 2020-09-14 19:40:45 UTC ]
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Picador serves up Auslander's Mother for Dinner

Picador has snapped up Mother for Dinner by Shalom Auslander, billed as the “funniest novel of the 2020s” and looking at identity, inheritance and cannibalism. Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2020-09-10 18:52:42 UTC ]
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The Case Against Nostalgia: A Conversation with Henri Cole

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. His previous books include the poetry collections Middle Earth, Blackbird and Wolf, Touch, and Pierce the Skin, as well as a memoir, Orphic Paris. He has received many awards for his work, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2020-09-04 08:51:11 UTC ]
More news stories like this | News stories tagged with: #books include