[{"id":276702,"date":"2026-09-15T05:10:02","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T09:10:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276702"},"modified":"2026-09-08T20:57:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T00:57:20","slug":"emily-st-john-mandel-on-writing-a-novel-of-dystopian-counterlives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/emily-st-john-mandel-on-writing-a-novel-of-dystopian-counterlives\/","title":{"rendered":"Emily St. John Mandel on Writing a Novel of Dystopian Counterlives"},"content":{"rendered":"

Post-pandemic dystopias are at the center of Emily St. John Mandel\u2019s most celebrated novels. Station Eleven<\/i><\/a> (2014), which won the Prix des Libraires du Qu\u00e9bec, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Toronto Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN\/Faulkner, takes place before, during, and after a fiercely contagious flu wipes out 99 percent of the world\u2019s population. Sea of Tranquility<\/i><\/a> (2022), which she described to me once as \u201cautofiction through a sci-fi lens combined with time travel,\u201d spans five centuries, beginning in 1912, with a pandemic wiping out Earth\u2019s population (it was written during the COVID pandemic).<\/p>\n

In her new novel, Exit Party<\/a>,<\/i> the dystopia is political. The year is 2031.\u201cThe United States had come undone following a coup d\u2019etat,\u201d she writes. \u201cSeveral states had seceded within a week of the coup, either alone or in alliances with neighbors.\u201d Another United States appears over time, a surveillance state with powerful controls.<\/p>\n

In our last conversation<\/a>, Mandel mentioned that she was working on \u201ca new novel that has characters from two of my previous books.\u201d And here it is; what motivated you to write Exit Party<\/i>? I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, here it is! There were a couple of starting points for this novel. One is that years after publishing my second novel, The Singer\u2019s Gun<\/i><\/a>, I remained fascinated by a character from that book, Ari. I found myself wondering what she\u2019d be like after a very long prison sentence, and I wanted to write about her again.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe other starting point was just the increasingly dire political situation in which we find ourselves in the United States. I started writing this novel in the spring of 2022, not long before I spoke with you, and the country was only slightly less fractured then than it is now. We were already seeing the effects on our politics of years of successful disinformation campaigns. It unfortunately doesn\u2019t take a wild leap of speculative imagination to imagine the country breaking apart, and I was interested in what the aftermath of a national collapse could look like. I\u2019ve never been particularly interested in disaster, but I am interested in its aftermath. There\u2019s hope in thinking about the world that follows catastrophic events.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Jane Ciabattari:<\/strong> Exit Party\u2019s<\/i> cast of characters includes Ari Waker, the villain who blackmails her cousin and partner in crime Anton Waker, the central character in The Singer\u2019s Gun<\/i> (2015). Elsewhere in the novel, we meet Lucas Alkaitis, the painter from The Glass Hotel<\/i><\/a>. What drew you back to Ari and Anton, and to Lucas?<\/p>\n

Emily St. John Mandel:<\/strong> This isn\u2019t a spoiler, because it\u2019s literally the plot of a novel I published in 2010, but one of the defining events of Ari\u2019s life is her decision to take out a contract on her cousin Anton. So as I mentioned, I\u2019d wanted to write about Ari again, and I felt like there was some emotional calculus where bringing Ari into this book required bringing Anton into the book too.<\/p>\n

To me, the doppelgangers are an embodiment of that counterlife: what if another of those versions of you were to suddenly appear before you?<\/p>\n

Lucas is there largely because of the painting, Swan Dive<\/i>, which moves through the narrative. I\u2019m interested in the way art moves through time, the way different people have relationships with a given work of art over decades or sometimes centuries. So I wanted to write about that, and I thought, \u201cwell, I already have this character from The Glass Hotel<\/i> who\u2019s a painter, maybe it would be interesting to bring him into this.\u201d<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> What do you find captivating about criminality?<\/p>\n

EM:<\/strong> In real life, it isn\u2019t captivating at all. Real-life criminality looks sad and sordid. It looks like all the locked-up people I\u2019ve met when I do events at prisons. But in fiction, it can drive a plot in an interesting way.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> And quantum entanglement theory, which involves particles linked in time instead of in space, which shows up several of your novels?<\/p>\n

EM:<\/strong> It\u2019s just so weird. Einstein called it \u201cspooky action at a distance.\u201d I like the spookiness.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> How did you settle on the title, Exit Party<\/i>?<\/p>\n

EM:<\/strong> I am terrible at titles! My original title for this novel was James Exits the Party, which sounds like a stage direction, also that\u2019s a little glimpse into a previous iteration of the plot. I liked that title, but literally no one else did. My wife and I talked about it endlessly, and she actually came up with Exit Party<\/i>.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Your opening scene sets up the puzzle. Ari Waker, 48, released from prison in Spring 2031 after served eighteen years for taking out a contract on her cousin Anton\u2019s life (\u201cIt was a mistake and I\u2019m not that person anymore\u201d), is exalted at her freedom as she walks around Los Angeles: \u201cthe blossoming of the jacaranda trees felt to Ari like grace.\u201d While she was in jail, the United States had disintegrated into civil war, separate nation states, opponents and alliances; the second part of the novel is set in a parallel authoritarian United States. On this spring day, international peacekeeping forces have just departed the city and Ari\u2019s roommate Gloria takes her to Kareem\u2019s party to celebrate the end of the citywide curfew.<\/p>\n

There, Ari meets a stranger named Saraya in a silvery dress who recognizes her and calls her \u201cIbari,\u201d her legal name. Later she spots a woman who looks identical to Saraya, but is wearing jean shorts and a T-shirt and keeps saying \u201cI don\u2019t know where I am.\u201d By the end of the night Kareem disappears, as does a painting on his wall. Identical characters at the same party. Identical countries, with different political systems and freedoms. Doppelgangers, doubles, anchor this novel. How did you develop that plotline?<\/p>\n

EM:<\/strong> Slowly and with great difficulty. I\u2019ve been interested for a long time in the idea of the counterlife, which is the life you didn\u2019t live: the life where you married a different person, or went to a different school, or emigrated instead of staying or vice versa, and the way any of those decisions would have pushed you toward becoming a slightly different version of yourself.<\/p>\n

But that frames the counterlife idea in terms of agency. There\u2019s another possibility, which is that if you\u2019d grown up in a different country, or a different family, that would also make you a slightly different version of your present self. To me, the doppelgangers are an embodiment of that counterlife: what if another of those versions of you were to suddenly appear before you? It\u2019s interesting to think about the counterlife of the individual, but it\u2019s also interesting to think about the counterlife of the state. It\u2019s easy for me to imagine a version of the United States that collapses into chaos, but it\u2019s also not hard to imagine a version that drifts further and further down an authoritarian path, especially when we encounter horrors like the ICE raids in Minneapolis.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Ari had been beset all her life by premonitions. She feels pulled toward the party at Kareem\u2019s by \u201can invisible thread.\u201d Later she senses when it will be her last day in a motel in Ohio, or knows when it\u2019s dangerous to be in a parking lot in Texas. In many cases, her premonitions save her from danger. Why did you choose this as a character trait?<\/p>\n

EM:<\/strong> I\u2019m always interested in characters who have some special quality\u2014foresight in this case, or intelligence, or inside knowledge\u2014that should save them from their fates but doesn\u2019t. I think it\u2019s interesting from a narrative perspective.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Part of the intrigue of the puzzle of Exit Party<\/i> is the structure. The novel is divided into three sections: A-Side, which describes one universe, B-Side, which is set in a parallel universe, and Swan Dive, which deals with a central recurring image, a painting created by Lucas Alkaitis, Sebastian\u2019s father, in 1968, which was hanging on the wall of Kareem\u2019s apartment in the opening scene. How did this structure evolve?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting to think about the counterlife of the individual, but it\u2019s also interesting to think about the counterlife of the state.<\/p>\n

EM:<\/strong> I began with the world in the A-Side, this version of the world where the United States has come undone and countless new small nations are forming. I knew early on that doppelgangers of two characters were going to come into that world, and I realized after a while that I was going to have to account for where they came from, so that led me to develop the B-Side universe, which took on a life of its own; it was interesting to consider the psychological implications of life in an authoritarian surveillance state.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> You are a master world-builder, having created a multiverse in your novels, sometimes multiple worlds, intersecting worlds, in one book, as in Exit Party<\/i>. How do you manage the details and keep everything in synch? Do you have computer programs? Walls of imagery or words? What does your writing space look like? Do you play music?<\/p>\n

EM:<\/strong> The details of a given book are always in my head while I\u2019m writing a novel, but I lose track of the multiverse all the time. I sometimes have to be reminded about the connections between books. I\u2019d forgotten that the architect of the Ponzi scheme in The Glass Hotel<\/i> makes a cameo appearance in The Lola Quartet<\/i><\/a> until someone mentioned it on Instagram the other day.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always liked the idea of a wall of words, and I tried that once with a previous book\u2014I think it was The Glass Hotel<\/i>\u2014but I just don\u2019t really have the wall space for that kind of thing, and it became more cumbersome than useful. I\u2019ve dabbled with computer programs, but I always run into the same problem, where the solution starts to feel more elaborate and complicated than the problem.<\/p>\n

I sometimes listen to ambient music while I\u2019m writing\u2014I like the album Sleep<\/i>, by Max Richter\u2014but more often these days I just listen to white noise, either rain or the Pacific Ocean.<\/p>\n

For years now I\u2019ve been dividing my time between New York City and Los Angeles. In LA the entire apartment is a single room. I love being there, because most of my friends are there at this point, but I have more space in New York City. In NYC, where I\u2019ve mostly been these past few months, I share an office with my wife. I work at a standing desk beside a window with a view of the East River. I love watching the movement of boats.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> How do you describe your work? Speculative fiction? Literary fiction? Sci-fi?<\/p>\n

EM:<\/strong> All of the above. I like the idea that a book can be more than one genre.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Which authors do you read?<\/p>\n

EM:<\/strong> I\u2019m more interested in contemporary fiction than in any other category of books. There are a handful of authors whose latest book I\u2019ll buy immediately as soon as I come across it in a bookstore: Charles Yu, Olivia Laing, Jesmyn Ward, Zadie Smith, Dan Chaon, Han Kang. Probably others I\u2019m not thinking of.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> What are you working on now\/next?<\/p>\n

EM:<\/strong> I just started a new novel. I\u2019ve also been working on the pilot script for a TV adaptation of Exit Party<\/i>, and I have a couple of other screen projects in development. I\u2019m trying to get a film adaptation of Last Night in Montreal <\/i>and a TV adaptation of The Lola Quartet<\/i> off the ground.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Exit Party<\/a> by Emily St. John Mandel is available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Post-pandemic dystopias are at the center of Emily St. John Mandel\u2019s most celebrated novels. Station Eleven (2014), which won the Prix des Libraires du Qu\u00e9bec, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Toronto Book Award and was a finalist for the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":188,"featured_media":276704,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43072],"tags":[4740,71419,1780,107462,3512,2955,60655,16228],"class_list":["post-276702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-in-conversation","tag-alfred-a-knopf","tag-author-interview","tag-emily-st-john-mandel","tag-exit-party","tag-interview","tag-jane-ciabattari","tag-knopf-doubleday-publishing-group","tag-penguin-random-house","story-type-in-conversation"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19YW","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Emily_SJM_Portraits3132finalflatsquarecroppreview-1.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/188"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276702\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276751,"date":"2026-09-15T05:09:30","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T09:09:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276751"},"modified":"2026-09-08T21:00:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T01:00:11","slug":"how-madeleine-thien-organizes-her-bookshelves-among-other-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-madeleine-thien-organizes-her-bookshelves-among-other-things\/","title":{"rendered":"How Madeleine Thien Organizes Her Bookshelves, Among Other Things"},"content":{"rendered":"

Madeleine Thien\u2019s new story collection, Simple Recipes<\/a> <\/em>is available now from W.W. Norton.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers?
\n<\/strong>Since I turned fifty, I have written most things by hand.<\/p>\n

Initially this was because of an illness whose origins were mysterious; typing caused incredible pain, to the point where I could not use my left hand. I feared that I might not be able to write or meet the demands of my various jobs. Strangely, however, I could handwrite. Thus, over the past few years I have written every short story and essay and, most recently, a new novel, by hand. Meanwhile, I\u2019m learning how to manage the pain because sometimes the keyboard is unavoidable.<\/p>\n

I was determined to write novels that no one expected me to write, least of all myself.<\/p>\n

But handwriting has proven to be a salve in so many ways. I am writing differently. It is a relief to be away from screens for many hours of the day and, at the same time, to feel less separated from the world, to be attuned to paper, pen, and the rhythm of the line being written. I feel like there is more space for the people in my novels to breathe.<\/p>\n

What’s one book you wish you had read when you were young?
\n<\/strong>Italo Calvino\u2019s Invisible Cities<\/i>. I wonder what I would have felt when I was young and so much seemed bewildering and marvellous and vast, and I feared that I would not make it to adulthood. I wonder how, as a girl of fourteen, I might have understood the states of mind and the conditions described in the novel. This book has been a touchstone for me.<\/p>\n

What’s the best or worst writing advice you’ve ever received?
\n<\/strong>Almost 30 years ago, someone in publishing showed me a proposed cover for one of my books. The image was of a beautiful Empress in brocade robes. When I said the design had absolutely no relation, none at all, to my novel, the person agreed. \u201cBut this is a great cover,\u201d they said. \u201cYou should write a novel to go with this cover.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was very young then, in my mid-twenties, and even though the words bothered me, I laughed it off. Nevertheless, it stayed with me as a kind of heartache around commodification and as a reality check. I was determined to write novels that no one expected me to write, least of all myself. Books that could not be easily categorised, and must find their own path. That self-knowledge stayed with me and lit a fire.<\/p>\n

How do you organize your bookshelves?
\n<\/strong>By the approximate year when the writer was born, and mixing all the books together, philosophy, history, art, fiction, poetry, English and French and translations. The bookshelf becomes a collective record of the times, ways of seeing, forms that flourished during particular eras, and also questions that persist across centuries.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s a book you recommend to other writers?
\n<\/strong>Adania Shibli\u2019s Touch, <\/i>translated by Paula Haydar. I want to put Adania Shibli\u2019s books in everyone\u2019s hands. I think she is the great writer and artist of our times. I\u2019ve just finished reading her new novel, Delusion<\/i>, translated by Kathrine Halls, forthcoming in 2027 from Knopf. It is rare to read a book that is essential today, this very instant, and that you also know will be read generations from now. It is one of the most shattering, exacting and profound novels I have ever read.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

\"Madeleine<\/p>\n

Simple Recipes<\/a> by Madeleine Thien is available from W. W. Norton and Company.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Madeleine Thien\u2019s new story collection, Simple Recipes is available now from W.W. Norton. * What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers? Since I turned fifty, I have written most things by hand. Initially this<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23208,"featured_media":276774,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43071,43069,6,43092],"tags":[5602,1149,18573,7820,27456,188,111871,12598],"class_list":["post-276751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-newsandculture","tag-advice","tag-craft","tag-madeleine-thien","tag-process","tag-qa","tag-short-stories","tag-simple-recipes","tag-w-w-norton-and-company"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19ZJ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/right-sidebar-banner-images-1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23208"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276974,"date":"2026-09-15T05:09:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T09:09:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276974"},"modified":"2026-09-13T06:34:39","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T10:34:39","slug":"on-falling-out-of-love-with-moscow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-falling-out-of-love-with-moscow\/","title":{"rendered":"On Falling Out of Love With Moscow"},"content":{"rendered":"

I grew up in Moscow at the tail end of the Soviet era. Despite its grand title\u2014the capital of the USSR\u2014the city of my youth held little charm. Life, at least for my family, was defined by scarcity, monotony, and drabness. I spent my teenage years longing for something better, so intensely it made my body ache. After school, which was tedious in the extreme, my best friend and I had absolutely nothing to do. There were no extracurriculars offered. Apart from reading books from my parents\u2019 modest library, we had little intellectual or aesthetic stimulation. For hours every day, we wandered our neighborhood, or others just like it, lined with identical apartment blocks, the occasional park with broken-down rides, and stores with empty shelves, in the futile hope of something remotely interesting happening to us. All the while, we lamented our limited, excruciatingly boring lives, wondering if anything would ever change.<\/p>\n

From American movies that trickled down to us through illegal or semi-legal video salons, where VHS tapes were shown to paying audiences, we knew what our peers\u2019 lives in the U.S. were like. They went to malls and restaurants, attended parties and football games, ate pizza, and drank Coca-Cola. How we craved all of it, along with Levi\u2019s jeans and graphic T-shirts! It seemed so unfair that other people were living life to the fullest while we were stuck in a looping eternity of sameness. I never dreamed that I would see it all with my own eyes.<\/p>\n

Yet after the Soviet Union fell in 1991, I moved to New York with my family. I tried to make up for everything I\u2019d missed, devouring every kind of experience. I took and audited as many classes at NYU as I could, partied hard, shopped, went to exhibitions, film screenings, and concerts, and took up painting and dancing. But even though New York turned out to be as exciting as I\u2019d imagined, and a place where I felt completely at home, I found myself missing Moscow, painfully, for no reason I could discern. Between semesters, I traveled there for short visits, and on one of those trips I fell in love with a man in a rock band and secretly married him.<\/p>\n

When I found out I was pregnant, it became obvious that I would move back, because I wanted my child to grow up in a Russian-speaking environment. Or maybe that was just a pretext, because by then I had already realized that I loved Moscow so much I was willing to give up an entirely different life in America just to be reunited with it.<\/p>\n

I love New York; it\u2019s my home now. But Moscow was the city I loved first. I may never be able to go there again.<\/p>\n

And so I arrived in Moscow, a twenty-one-year-old with a degree in philosophy and a newborn baby. It was 1997, and the decade known as the Wild Nineties, marked by economic hardship and chaos, was drawing to a close. The city felt vibrant and full of possibility, especially as Russia seemed firmly on its way to a democratic future. I began writing and published a novel, which eventually landed me a job writing features for a women’s magazine. My marriage didn\u2019t last, and before long I was a single mother supporting myself and my son through freelance reporting.<\/p>\n

In 1999, Vladimir Putin became prime minister of Russia, chosen by President Yeltsin as his successor. Seeing Putin\u2019s face on television for the first time, I somehow intuited the terrible things to come. They came much sooner than I could\u2019ve imagined. A series of apartment bombings struck several Russian cities, including Moscow, killing hundreds of people. Night after night, I found myself sitting in front of the television, gripped by terror as I watched the news. What if my building were next? Even more horrifying than death was the thought of lying there, trapped beneath the rubble, listening to my two-year-old son desperately crying for help.<\/p>\n

The attacks were blamed on Chechen terrorists, but it soon became evident to anyone willing to look at the evidence with their eyes half-open that the FSB, which Putin had just headed, was the real perpetrator. He needed a pretext for another war in Chechnya, and the war became his ticket to the presidency. As it unfolded, more terrorist attacks and hostage crises followed, each more devastating than the last, and he used every one of them to consolidate his power and restrict freedom of speech.<\/p>\n

But despite all this, I loved living in Moscow. How can I explain it? I was young. Life felt meaningful and exhilarating. Moscow was a vast city with an incredible energy and a character all its own. Simply walking from the subway to my destination in the center was enough to make me happy. There were beautiful boulevards, sweeping bridges over the Moskva River, wide Stalin-era avenues lined with imposing granite buildings, and quiet nineteenth-century neighborhoods of pastel-colored mansions. There were museums and theaters, and clubs, and the feeling that the city never slept. And then there was the subway. Many of its stations look as though they were built for the tsars, clad in precious marble and adorned with mosaics, crystal chandeliers, sculptures, and gilded moldings. Trains arrive every three minutes, and the stations are so clean you could eat off the floor.<\/p>\n

Even as the country\u2019s leadership grew more corrupt and repressive, Moscow kept getting more dazzling. In the early and mid-2000s, Russia benefited from surging oil prices, and much of that money poured into the capital. The city was transformed. New parks, public spaces, museums, and cultural venues opened, along with stores and restaurants to rival those of any European capital. When Russians discovered karaoke, thousands of venues sprang up, from cheap sushi joints to lavish establishments where an orchestra and backup singers accompanied anyone willing to step onto the stage and, for a few minutes, feel like a star. The service industry reached a level of convenience that still seems almost utopian. You could order virtually anything around the clock, have a haircut at home at three in the morning or an MRI in the middle of the night\u2014anything, really, as long as you could pay.<\/p>\n

By ghouls, I meant anyone associated with the state apparatus, like the police or the secret services, whose main job was to identify those opposed to the regime and neutralize them.<\/p>\n

By then, I was building a career in glossy magazines, quickly rising to senior editorial positions. For many people I knew and worked with, the city\u2019s seductions made it easy to ignore the larger picture. People with good jobs enjoyed their comfortable lifestyle, traveled the world, and looked away when courts issued unlawful rulings, when dissenters were tortured in prison, and when the president effectively discarded the constitution, allowing himself to become a ruler for life. They learned to tune out a whole dimension of reality. When I occasionally voiced my concerns to friends, they would say, \u201cWhat are you talking about? Life here is great.\u201d Many attributed the country\u2019s stability and prosperity to Putin, who in fact had little to do with either. Like everyone else, he profited from oil revenues, except that he and his cronies profited far more because they stole billions.<\/p>\n

The logic of the regime was that it could never be satisfied with what it already had. It kept growing greedier and more violent, steadily chewing away at its citizens\u2019 rights. I felt increasingly unsafe, as though I no longer had a place in Moscow. After Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 and another wave of repressive laws followed, I made the difficult decision to leave.<\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t do it immediately. My partner at the time and I had to get married so we could apply for a U.S. visa for him. For the next two years, I existed in between. I knew I was leaving, and this time it was for good. I would walk through my favorite Moscow neighborhoods with my heart breaking because I didn\u2019t know if I\u2019d ever see them again.<\/p>\n

Before I finally left in 2016, I had a conversation with my best friend in which I, yet again, tried to justify my decision. I said that the city had been seized by ghouls. By ghouls, I meant anyone associated with the state apparatus, like the police or the secret services, whose main job was to identify those opposed to the regime and neutralize them, but also all those men in expensive suits stepping out of expensive cars with expressions that suggested they owned the place: the oligarchs and corrupt civil servants. And they did. Moscow belonged to them now, not to people like me.<\/p>\n

Out of that conversation grew my novel The Undead<\/em><\/a>, which is, in some ways, a parting love letter to Moscow. The title refers not only to the horror film my protagonist, Maya, is trying to make, but also to the city\u2019s new masters and to those living in a zombified state of willful ignorance. Maya, who is based on that very friend, belongs to the latter group. She enjoys her life and pays little attention to politics\u2014until politics comes for her.<\/p>\n

Readers often tell me Moscow feels like a character in my book. When they ask if I still love it, I honestly don\u2019t know how to answer. I love New York; it\u2019s my home now. But Moscow was the city I loved first. I may never be able to go there again. Under current laws, returning could mean many years in prison because of what I\u2019ve published against Putin and the war in Ukraine. I\u2019ve learned to live with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I grew up in Moscow at the tail end of the Soviet era. Despite its grand title\u2014the capital of the USSR\u2014the city of my youth held little charm. Life, at least for my family, was defined by scarcity, monotony, and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28673,"featured_media":276977,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43103,43092,43095],"tags":[5470,17107,7923,43417,108696,108697,76211],"class_list":["post-276974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-memoir","category-newsandculture","category-politics","tag-moscow","tag-oligarchs","tag-putin","tag-russian-politics","tag-svetlana-satchkova","tag-the-undead","tag-war-in-ukraine"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a3k","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Untitled-design-2026-09-11T135057.355.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28673"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276974\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276895,"date":"2026-09-15T05:09:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T09:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276895"},"modified":"2026-09-17T20:49:37","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T00:49:37","slug":"on-the-orientalism-and-imperial-gaze-of-western-horror-films","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-the-orientalism-and-imperial-gaze-of-western-horror-films\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Orientalism and Imperial Gaze of Western Horror Films"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let me just say I don\u2019t like Lee Cronin. Not that I know the Irishman, best known for regurgitating horror\u2019s tired tropes with a view to winning the most nauseating gore competition\u2014but I watched his latest film. And no matter how I look at things now, I cannot bring myself to like him.<\/p>\n

As Layla El-Faouly in the Disney+ miniseries Moon Knight<\/i>, the Egyptian-Palestinian actor May Calamawy gave a convincing, emotionally potent performance in English. I have no idea how good her Egyptian Arabic is, but, using my mother tongue in Lee Cronin\u2019s The Mummy<\/i>, Calamawy\u2019s Detective Dalia Zaki comes across like an English speaker mindlessly parroting sounds she does not understand. In this way Lee Cronin achieves the seemingly impossible task of employing, not a white American but a \u201creal native\u201d to portray what nonetheless amounts to a Hollywood parody of one.<\/p>\n

This is just as true of Zaki\u2019s nemesis, identified simply as the Magician (the Iraqi-British Hayat Kamille), along with every \u201cEgyptian\u201d character here. Not only their accents but the intonation, the stress, the pauses, everything about their Arabic is a kind of coded moviespeak that, were it not unintelligible, would be indistinguishable from the rest of the film\u2019s canned dialogue. The words are technically Arabic, but they might as well be Chakobsa: the language David and Jessie Peterson invented for the pseudo-Arab inhabitants of the desert planet Arakis in Denis Villeneuve\u2019s Dune<\/i> films. The only\u2014passing\u2014exception is the man who plays Calamawy\u2019s young colleague at one point; and his<\/i> lines seem to be dubbed with the help of AI.<\/p>\n

In Lee Cronin\u2019s The Mummy<\/i>, evil is a native sickness that contaminates an otherwise perfect, unsullied child of empire. That is the only reason<\/i> Egypt is there at all.<\/p>\n

Otherwise, while they look<\/i> Egyptian, the body language and mannerism pool the characters draw on makes sure that they move<\/i> as well as talk<\/i> American. From the way the detective munches on a sandwich, standing, while she chats with the aforementioned man to the way the possessed woman crawls, each character feels like a skin for some stock blockbuster type, Calamawy\u2019s intrepid cop and Kamille\u2019s wicked witch being the most obviously pedigreed.<\/p>\n

But, aside from the fact that it consists of \u201ca bunch of cheesy jolts and a vulgar array of physical assaults, most of them aimed at young girls and old women\u201d, critics seem to agree that this is more of an exorcism than a mummy film. There are wrappings inscribed with incantations that seem to replace the skin of the victim, but no preserved cadaver reanimated. No mummy. That\u2019s why the film has been been called \u201cA Laughably Bad Attempt at The Exorcist<\/i>\u201d and an \u201cEvil Dead<\/i> follow up in all but name\u201d. But if you happen to be even minimally culturally aware, there is this, arguably graver problem.<\/p>\n

In Lee Cronin\u2019s The Mummy<\/i>, evil is a native sickness that contaminates an otherwise perfect, unsullied child of empire. That is the only reason<\/i> Egypt is there at all: to be, as I\u2019ve called Arab Muslims in Postmuslim: A Testimony<\/i><\/a>, \u201cthe foil of civilization\u201d. This is precisely the Orientalism the essays in the book take issue with. It reduces millions of Arab Muslim lives and thousands of years of Arab Muslim history to mere packaging\u2014a kind of themed carrier bag in which to transport the kind of \u201cdesires, regressions, investments, and projections\u201d Edward Said spoke of in his landmark book\u2014and to what end?<\/p>\n

Cronin\u2019s country is a ludicrous Arabian Nights<\/i> phantasmagoria of randomly \u201cEastern\u201d visual cues, black magic, fantasies of Sahara, and strangely sanitized government offices that look like a sendup of Cairo\u2019s notoriously gritty bureacratic spaces. Meanwhile the country\u2019s actual sights and sounds, including its everyday mores\u2014all ignored. We have no woman police officers in criminal investigations, for one thing; but even if we did, no woman who wears hijab while in uniform would take it off while not; and no one at all would dream of answering the phone by stating their surname.<\/p>\n

None of which is to broach the story<\/i> of the film, which opens with the worst imaginable disconnect for an Egyptian viewer.<\/p>\n

Back in pre-internet times, when you could perhaps excuse people for being appallingly ignorant of things they weren\u2019t familiar with, a fellow undergraduate in Hull, England found out I was Egyptian. \u201cWow, Egypt!\u201d he said. \u201cDo some of you get around on camelback, then?\u201d He was probably na\u00efve rather than disingenuous, but in 2026 the same cannot be said for a forty-four-year-old director or the big production companies he works for. And truly, now, does the idea of a modern Egyptian family having an underground pyramid in the backyard of their Aswan home<\/i> strike you as any less pathetically misguided?<\/p>\n

Likewise ancient Egypt: really, the only Egyptian thing a film like this might credibly draw on. It is reduced not<\/i> to an exoticized object the imperialist gaze can freak itself out about\u2014as Mummy<\/i> films have traditionally done with it\u2014but to a lame excuse for a bilious bonanza bereft of \u201cscares, satire, wit, or humour,\u201d or any convincing storytelling.<\/p>\n

Consciously or not…he references a predatory culture so completely narcissistic it cannot conceive of another except as inert raw material into which only it<\/i> can breathe life. <\/p>\n

In the small black pyramid is a sarcophagus, in the sarcophagus an ancient mummy possessed by an immortal demon, the \u201cDestroyer of Families\u201d, Nasmaranian (why it has what sounds like an Armenian<\/i> name, I don\u2019t know). The magician\u2014and apparently her family, down through the generations\u2014is responsible for keeping this creature at bay by binding it to a living body that remains immobile. Nasmaranian\u2019s host needs to be replaced every so often in eternity. Now that the demon has awakened, killing the Magician\u2019s husband Gamal (Omar El-Saeidi) while it does so, a new body must be found.<\/p>\n

And, seeking something young and healthy, who should the Magician target but the unsuspecting daughter of a Cairo-based American journalist? A dedicated family man, wholesome, sensible, and ambitious, in this set-up Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) is the unequivocal agent of civilization.<\/p>\n

To perform civilization\u2019s duty of truth-telling, Charlie has been living in Cairo with his pregnant wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), though he is soon moving onto greater things. And behind their backs, while playing in the garden of a house that doesn\u2019t look like anything Egyptian, their daughter Katie (Natalie Grace; Emily Mitchell as a child) is tricked into a friendship with the Magician\u2019s daughter Layla (May Elghety; Aisha Laouini as a child). Until the magician herself arrives with a scarab in an apple that incapacitates the child and a sandstorm into which she can disappear with her. Trailed uselessly by Charlie, who is next seen ordering the police chief about.<\/p>\n

Why on earth the Magician would choose an American girl<\/i> remains unclear. But it is no less inexplicable than the plane crash that, eight years after Katie disappears, exposes the sarcophagus being transported with her inside. Or the fact that the Magician has recorded the group ritual through which the demon was transported into the little girl\u2019s body on videotape. Or Dalia\u2019s spontaneous ability to perform the same ritual effectively without the usual cohort of Nasmaranian trustees in the video by reciting a few lines of laughable formal Arabic. Twice.<\/p>\n

When the possessed Katie eventually joins the family in Albuquerque, New Mexico, there is much Catholic prayer on the part of Larissa\u2019s mother Carmen (Ver\u00f3nica Falc\u00f3n). Predictably, it has no effect on Nasmaranian. But the remarkable thing is\u2014apart from erroneously making the hijab a part of Egyptian police uniform, and despite religion\u2019s close association with sorcery and possession, in 132 protracted minutes Cronin makes no reference to Islam (or Coptic Christianity). Not one.<\/p>\n

Until the mystery is resolved and Nasmaranian is transported through Charlie, who bravely carries him back to Egypt, into the Magician, now in custody\u2014the happy ending of just punishments!\u2014Cronin references, instead, every last American horror trope both on-screen and off. The horror of imperialism, especially.<\/p>\n

Consciously or not\u2014and this is why I don\u2019t like Lee Cronin\u2014he references a predatory culture so completely narcissistic it cannot conceive of another except as inert raw material into which only it<\/i> can breathe life. So that, zombie- or indeed mummy-like, the barbarians can mimic imperial subjects enough to look human. The better to act out empire\u2019s idea of what disgusting demonic sickness looks like.<\/p>\n

____________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Postmuslim: A Testimony<\/a> by Youssef Rakha is available from Graywolf Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let me just say I don\u2019t like Lee Cronin. Not that I know the Irishman, best known for regurgitating horror\u2019s tired tropes with a view to winning the most nauseating gore competition\u2014but I watched his latest film. And no matter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32173,"featured_media":276998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43093,43092,43095],"tags":[7745,12337,937,50737,112250,112249,35146,14403],"class_list":["post-276895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-film-and-tv","category-newsandculture","category-politics","tag-egypt","tag-film-criticism","tag-graywolf-press","tag-horror-films","tag-lee-cronin","tag-postmuslim-a-testimony","tag-the-mummy","tag-youssef-rakha","story-type-horror-films"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a23","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-mummy-scaled.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32173"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276895\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":277009,"date":"2026-09-15T05:09:06","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T09:09:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277009"},"modified":"2026-09-14T14:26:04","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T18:26:04","slug":"trying-to-look-into-the-mirror-of-my-past-as-a-korean-adoptee-in-the-united-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/trying-to-look-into-the-mirror-of-my-past-as-a-korean-adoptee-in-the-united-states\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking in the Mirror of My Past as a Korean Adoptee in the United States"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mirrors\"<\/p>\n

\u201cA second surface mirror, also known as a standard or regular mirror, creates a ghosting effect (double image).\u201d
\n______________________________________________________________<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

\u201cDisplaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers.\u201d
\n\u2013Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer<\/i>, as quoted in his essay \u201cHorrific Surrealism: Writing on Migration,\u201d Paris Review <\/i>blog, March 6, 2025
\n*<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I have one photo of myself in South Korea. It was taken by someone at the Holt International adoption agency. A notecard is leaning against the front of my sweater. On it is written in English: my name Shin, Sun Yung<\/i>, my orphan case number K-6596<\/i>, and my birthdate. The back of the photo, like the back of a mirror, is blank.<\/div>\n

My name, the case number, and my birthdate are all assigned by the agency.<\/p>\n

You could say that my case number was a fact and my birthdate and my name were, and are, fictions.<\/p>\n

With this kind of origin, how could I not become a writer? Out of the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet, or any writing system, an identity can be assigned, fixed\u2014and made, if not real, then socially legible and governmentally legal.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Looking at ourselves.<\/p>\n

Humans have been using materials such as polished obsidian as mirrors for 8,000 years. Mirrors manufactured in China, technology that could date as far back as the Han Dynasty (206 BC-24 AD), eventually made their way to Korea and Japan. One of my favorite stories from The Story Bag<\/i>, one of the few books I had as a child that were from or about Korea, is \u201cThe Bridegroom\u2019s Shopping.\u201d<\/p>\n

I suspect every adopted person or anyone raised in a family or situation in which she is not genetically related to anyone else has a special relationship to mirrors.<\/p>\n

This folktale opens by describing a venerable old farming family whose only daughter has just married. As was the custom in ancient Korea before the Joseon Dynasty and its adoption of Confucianism, husbands lived with their wives\u2019 families. The inciting incident of the story is the bridegroom\u2019s trip, which begins at the matrilocal dwelling:<\/p>\n

A few days after the marriage it so happened that the bridegroom had to go to town on some business. As he prepared to leave, his bride asked him: \u201cWill you please buy me a comb in town?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy, of course,\u201d he answered, all eager to please his pretty bride.<\/p>\n

However, his wife knew that her husband was a very forgetful man. Hadn\u2019t her in-laws told her so? As she wondered how he could be made to remember, she chanced to look at the sky. There was a new moon, a thin crescent of pale light, shining softly in the sky. It was only three days old, and it looked just like the moon-shaped comb she wanted.<\/p>\n

The young wife tells her husband to look at the comb-shaped moon and if he forgets his shopping task, he should remember to look at the sky.<\/p>\n

In town, the bridegroom carries on with his business which takes several days, and as his wife feared he forgets about the comb. As he prepares to leave by looking around the room in which he\u2019s been staying to see if he has everything, he happens to look out the window, \u201cand there he saw a big, round moon shining in the sky. Ten days had passed since he had left home. The moon was no longer a small sliver of light but a round, laughing globe of silver.\u201d<\/p>\n

It reminds him that his wife asked him to buy her something. He asks a shopkeeper to sell him something that looks like the moon for his wife. The shopkeeper is delighted to show him a mirror: \u201cA young bride would want it when she pretties herself. I am sure it could be nothing else.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bridegroom had never seen a mirror for they were very rare, and sure the shopkeeper is correct, he purchases it. When he returns to his house and his wife asks him if he did her shopping, he hands her the \u201cstrange round object.\u201d She peers into \u201cthe smooth glass.\u201d<\/p>\n

She is met by a vision of a \u201cpretty young woman\u201d and angrily complains to her mother that she asked him for a comb and he brought home a \u201cstrange young woman.\u201d Of course when her mother looks into it, she sees \u201ca wrinkled old woman\u201d and says the stranger must be an \u201cold relative of ours from a neighboring village.\u201d The two argue angrily. A small boy enters while eating a rice cake; he looks into the mirror, and sees a stranger who has taken his rice cake. He throws up his arm to strike the boy, and the other boy does the same, and they both begin to cry in fear.<\/p>\n

The grandfather comes in and spies \u201ca fierce-looking old man\u201d in the mirror and is about to strike the aggressor for interfering with quarreling boys. He drops the mirror and it falls, crashes loudly, and then \u201cthe grandfather, and the boy, and the two women, and the bridegroom all fell silent and stood staring dumbly at the hundreds of pieces of broken glass beneath their feet,\u201d which is the end of the story.<\/p>\n

What I enjoyed about the story was seeing adults being taken in by something that I as a child already knew about\u2014mirrors. In terms of the story\u2019s situation, looking back I know that I internalized this and many other narratives of men leaving the home to work in the outside world. The secondary lesson of the tale was that women are dependent on forgetful men for purchasing what they desired.<\/p>\n

Almost all folktales are lessons about family, about roles and belonging. Who is known, and who is a stranger.<\/p>\n

This also mirrored the home in which I was raised; my father went to an office every day and my mom stayed home (and drove all over town) taking care of my older brother and I, the house and garden, our pet dog, and our father. I grew up observing my mother make three meals a day, wash and dry the dishes by hand, wash and iron my father\u2019s shirts and handkerchiefs, clip coupons and shop for groceries, vacuum, mop, dust, wash windows, balance the checkbook, and make sure we got to and from school, our lessons and activities, doctors and dentist appointments, friends\u2019 houses, and on and on, day after day, for years and years.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Bridegroom\u2019s Shopping\u201d is also a portrait of being <\/i>vs. doing <\/i>(the woman exists, the man acts) and Simone de Beauvoir\u2019s ideas presented in The Second Sex <\/i>on man-constructed-as-subject and woman-constructed-as-object. The household turns to chaos because the husband prioritizes his business and forgets his wife\u2019s single request. In addition, it\u2019s a story about modernity; the bride is from a prosperous family yet they are still \u201ccountry\u201d people, not \u201ccity\u201d people. They are not cosmopolitan, exposed to the latest technologies, and don\u2019t know what a mirror is or what it\u2019s for.<\/p>\n

The woman\u2019s vanity and the husband\u2019s forgetfulness collide to sow chaos and discord in the house. You can see this pattern in many American sitcoms, in which the wife wants something beautiful or useful for herself or the home, in order to elevate the family in some way, and the husband is a well-meaning bumbler who introduces comedy into the situation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Bridegroom\u2019s Shopping\u201d may have also been a lesson to my young mind that if a woman wants something done right, she should do it herself, but either she wasn\u2019t inclined or allowed at that time in Korea. Almost all folktales are lessons about family, about roles and belonging. Who is known, and who is a stranger.<\/p>\n

The Story Bag: A Collection of Korean Folktales <\/i>by Kim So-un and translated by Setsu Higashi was published by Tuttle in Tokyo, Japan in 1955. This was ten years after Japan lost World War II and had to surrender its imperial territories, including Korea, which it had annexed in 1910, and two years after 1953, the unofficial end of the devastating Korean Civil War.<\/p>\n

Kim So-un, fluent in both Japanese and Korean, grew up in colonial Korea. In his foreword, he writes, \u201c\u2026stories do not like to be hoarded, but want to be told and told again, passing always from lip to lip. These stories were first heard in my childhood in Korean, then written down by me in Japanese, and finally translated into English by Mrs. [Setsu] Higashi.\u201d<\/p>\n

There weren\u2019t mirrors in our house except above the bathroom sinks and attached to my parents\u2019 and brother\u2019s bedroom dressers. I didn\u2019t have a mirror in my room until I was a teen. My mother is always dressed neatly, comfortably, but is not a vain woman or someone overly concerned with appearances; for example, she did not wear makeup except on holidays and special occasions, and then it was only a modest swipe of dark pink drugstore lipstick.<\/p>\n

In some ways my life as an immigrant, since the age of about one-and-a-half years old, feels like a second surface<\/i>.<\/p>\n

I suspect every adopted person or anyone raised in a family or situation in which she is not genetically related to anyone else has a special relationship to mirrors. The people in your family are not your mirrors\u2014you can\u2019t look at your mother and see the genetics of your eyes or your smile; you can\u2019t look at your father and see your skin color or hair texture if you\u2019re a different race from your adoptive family. You don\u2019t have the same hands as a sibling. You don\u2019t know where your personality comes from. For many intercountry adoptees, you don\u2019t know where the parts of you or the whole \u201cyou\u201d come from, beyond the country and perhaps the city or region.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re an adopted kid, any mirror in your dwelling confirms, every time you look in it, just like in a family photo, that your belonging was a jiggered thing, and that you\u2019re out of place in one way, and in place in another. It\u2019s both. You\u2019re not between <\/i>anything. You are in one place, but there\u2019s a permanent echo of that other place, the you <\/i>then before you became this you<\/i>.<\/p>\n

The mirror is an uncanny place, fixing you, reminding you that you are here <\/i>and not there<\/i>. \u201cAmerica\u201d and not \u201cKorea.\u201d This family, known<\/i>, and the other family or families, unknown<\/i>. Forever conjoined, appearing, as in \u201cThe Bridegroom\u2019s Shopping,\u201d like an uncanny stranger in the reflection.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

There are several kinds of mirrors\u2014concave, convex, flexible, plane, front-silvered, back-silvered, and more.<\/p>\n

Most everyday mirrors are back-silvered and are thus considered \u201csecond surface\u201d mirrors, which means they are made of a glass substrate with a reflecting coating behind it.<\/p>\n

For me as an immigrant, as an adopted person, there are some aspects of this multilayered, multi-material tool that work as a metaphor.<\/p>\n

The poetics of the mirror.<\/p>\n

The poetics of self-perception, memory, time, surface, depth, flatness, dimension, boundaries.<\/p>\n

In some ways my life as an immigrant, since the age of about one-and-a-half years old, feels like a second surface<\/i>. There\u2019s a liminal place between the outside of the glass and the reflecting material. Light enters, and an image is reflected, but one\u2019s consciousness is scaleable, elastic, shrinkable to the space within the glass. One\u2019s consciousness can try to get close to the first layer behind the thin metal layer without ever merging with it.<\/p>\n

As someone raised separately from my original family and my original culture, and who despite efforts by available means, has not been able to identify, locate, or make contact with any original relatives, I have no stories about, or evidence of, my Korean family or Korean ancestors. For now, I am the story and I am the evidence.<\/p>\n

To be separated from your family of origin means intimacy without proximity. Form without knowledge.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I think about DNA and our individual, interrelated forms. I think about how my own children can look at their (biological, genetic, gestational) parents (who are one and the same with their social and legal parents\u2014the people who raised them) and know exactly why one of them instinctively loves art and the other instinctively loves things with wheels.<\/p>\n

Being the product of reproduction but not knowing from whom is, to me, like the back of a second surface mirror, the part that provides the surface for the silvered layer, which is then covered with a piece of glass. There is always a refraction.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Looking into the mirror of my past is part historical exploration, private investigation, community recovery, and personal guesswork. When there are informational dead ends, which is mostly what I have, it is not unlike looking at the back of a mirror. It\u2019s not nothing; it\u2019s a surface with nothing written on it, and no reflection. It\u2019s a doorway with no door, a window made of solid wood. But this is what I have, this is what many adopted people have. Before I had my two children, my \u201creverse engineering\u201d process was even more information-poor. I\u2019ve passed down that structure of absence to my children, and they will carry it for the rest of their lives. How much does nothing <\/i>weigh, when the nothing <\/i>is filled with longing, curiosity, confusion, discomfort, and grief?<\/p>\n

Being an adoptee is a lifelong lesson in impermanence.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a quality of paranoia to not knowing\u2014like when you suspect something is behind you, perhaps you feel a breeze on your skin, but you can\u2019t see it or sense its shape or size or speed or distance, and when you turn around, it\u2019s gone. In many cultures, spirit doubles, or doppelg\u00e4ngers, are considered bad luck.<\/p>\n

What is the physics\u2014the velocity, frequency, mass, volume\u2014the force of absence? Not just one absence, but a thousand absences. Questions that will not be answered but keep forming, like air bubbles rising to the surface, only to break.<\/p>\n

What the burning desire to know where one comes from proves that we are not truly individuals, but parts of a continuity. As a test case for individuality, the rewritten adopted person like myself shows individuality to be, in some ways, a hoax.<\/p>\n

The sense of being outside the patterns of human familial weaving is very sharp. A sense of newness and self-invention which can look like freedom but internally more often feels like meaninglessness. An existential condition. I exist, but why? From where?<\/p>\n

Being part of a second, adoptive, family means you know that families can be deconstructed, constructed, and further deconstructed. Having a second or third name means you can be decoupled from language at any time, and that it might be wise to hold onto names lightly. Being an adoptee is a lifelong lesson in impermanence. But if you let go too soon, or too much, you might let go of everything. Psychiatry calls it depersonalization. Taken to its most extreme logic of detachment from humanity, exerting the the will into a detachment from one\u2019s physical life\u2014the Romans called it suicide.<\/p>\n

Without knowing who my family is, and was, I am limited in how much I can know about myself. My body is the result of their reproduction, but no decoder to know where I get my exact skin color, the shape of my fingers, my temperament and personality. It can feel like looking into a mirror, but seeing nothing but the glass.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

To be severed from your people and your history\u2014your inheritance\u2014but to want to know, to have a mind that, as an adult, is always wondering about what combination of people, places, and circumstances came together to create your existence, is a kind of constant hunger. The majority of the time in my life, other more pressing and practical life matters present themselves to be sorted, managed, resolved, etc. But when I pause, as I am now, to attempt to describe what living with this condition feels like, my mind searches for metaphors, for multipart objects like a second surface mirror. Unlike a polished piece of metal which is reflective and the same material from every direction, a second surface mirror is an assemblage, has a transparent layer, a reflective layer, and an opaque layer.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

As an immigrant I seek to understand what it means to be mobile, to have been moved, removed, to cross an ocean, to be placed, to be held, to be kept, to transform from resident to citizen. It feels like a kind of time travel, folding of time back and forth. Prisms. Refractions.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t really know how any immigrant could entirely avoid ever imagining a parallel life in which they never migrated. In science fiction stories about time travel, there\u2019s often a kind of shimmer, a ripple, or a portal, not unlike a mirror. One can dream, one can speculate, one can contemplate Borgesian forking paths. I suppose the trick is to not get lost, not stop too long in the gaze, forever, like Narcissus, drawn permanently into the dream of the reflection.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

A company called \u201cFSM,\u201d standing for First Surface Mirror<\/a>, has a simple diagram on its website with this caption, \u201cA second surface mirror, also known as a standard or regular mirror, creates a ghosting effect (double image).\u201d<\/p>\n

A company called Abrisa Technologies<\/a> explains when you would sometimes want to use a first surface mirror as opposed to a second surface mirror:<\/p>\n

Most people are familiar with conventional mirrors that we see and use every day, from the bathroom mirror, a hand held mirror, or a car\u2019s rearview mirror. These mirrors use glass as a protective surface and have the mirror coating, commonly referred to as \u201csilvering,\u201d on the back side, or \u201csecond surface.\u201d The exposed glass helps protect the mirror coating underneath from scratching or degradation due to environmental factors such as weather, fingerprints, and dust.<\/p>\n

In high-precision applications, second surface mirrors have some very distinct disadvantages. Light traveling through the glass to strike the reflective material on the backside or second surface creates a refracted or bent image as well as some loss of energy, essentially dimming and distorting the reflection. A faint secondary reflection is also created from light striking the front of the glass. This secondary image is referred to as a \u201cghost image\u201d or \u201cghosting effect.\u201d<\/p>\n

This, too, is a good metaphor, the ghosting effect<\/i>. I think even when I\u2019m not writing autobiographically, I\u2019m writing to understand the ghosts and distortions that result from the second surface, or even the space between my first life and my second life. It\u2019s hard, or impossible, to always tell what is reality, what is fantasy, and what is some combination. Does my affect, my grief, my sorrow, and my shame come from pre-verbal, pre-remembered wounds, trauma? Or from an inborn and immutable temperament? From stories? Which ones? DNA? Hormones? Bacteria? Microplastics? It\u2019s exhausting and cyclical and the finer-grained the questions, the more diminishing the returns. The light can only bounce around so much before it disappears and leaves you, again, in the dark, alone.<\/p>\n

Ghosts are an ancient human technology, and I don\u2019t believe we as a species are done with them, or perhaps they are not done with us. That works for me. Betty Jean Lifton, a psychologist, white domestic adoptee, and author, wrote the book Journey of the Adopted Self: A Quest for Wholeness <\/i>which was published in 1995. In the chapter \u201cGhost Kingdom\u201d she writes:<\/p>\n

Carl Jung said that among all possible ghosts that haunt us, the spirits of the parents possess the greatest significance. Having been banished from the adopted child\u2019s everyday world by the closed adoption system, the birth parents become little more than the ghosts I described in chapter 1. (\u201cHereditary ghosts,\u201d the Finnish psychiatrist Max Frisk labeled them.) I call the spectral place in which these ghosts reside as the Ghost Kingdom. It is an awesome sphere, located only in the adoptee\u2019s psychic reality. The Forbidden Self, and occasionally even the Artificial Self, slips into the Ghost Kingdom to rendezvous with the lost mother and the lost baby, who never had a chance to grow into the child it should have been. One man described it as \u201ca forbidden world, like a hole\u2014wonderful, terrifying, ghostly\u2014that you could fall into completely.\u201d Once there, it is not necessarily a peaceable kingdom, for the adoptee is free to express not only love but anger at being, as one woman put it, \u201ccast out into the world with strangers.\u201d<\/p>\n

_________________________________<\/p>\n

\"heart<\/a><\/p>\n

Sun Yung Shin\u2019s<\/em> Heart Eater<\/a> is available now from Black Lawrence Press. Sun Yung Shin will be launching the memoir at Minneapolis\u2019s Moon Palace Books, September 15 at 7pm.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cA second surface mirror, also known as a standard or regular mirror, creates a ghosting effect (double image).\u201d ______________________________________________________________   \u201cDisplaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9989,"featured_media":277028,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43101,43103],"tags":[1159,4679,43602,1482,112273,1045,107,4677,94037,11741,112274,11836],"class_list":["post-277009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-history","category-memoir","tag-adoption","tag-belonging","tag-black-lawrence-press","tag-family","tag-heart-eater","tag-identity","tag-immigration","tag-korea","tag-korean-folktales","tag-mirrors","tag-origins","tag-sun-yung-shin"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a3T","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Irworobongdo-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9989"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277009\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276940,"date":"2026-09-15T05:08:46","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T09:08:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276940"},"modified":"2026-09-13T06:23:25","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T10:23:25","slug":"lit-hub-asks-5-authors-7-questions-no-wrong-answers-september-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/lit-hub-asks-5-authors-7-questions-no-wrong-answers-september-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Hub Asks: 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Lit Hub Author Questionnaire is a monthly interview featuring seven questions for five authors with new books. This month we talk to:<\/p>\n

Grace Krilanovich (Acid Green Velvet<\/em><\/a>)<\/strong>
\nEmily Ogden (Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe<\/em><\/a>)<\/strong>
\nPaisley Rekdal (Heritance<\/em><\/a>)<\/strong>
\nJim Shepard (The Queen of Bad Influences<\/em><\/a>)<\/strong>
\nAnkur Thakkar (Blow Yourself Up<\/em><\/a>)<\/strong><\/p>\n

*
\nWithout summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Grace Krilanovich: <\/strong>Freedom, mobility; who gets to be an artist; style, ornamentation, artifice; work, leisure; the counterculture; the denigration of femininity; West Coast oddballism.<\/p>\n

Emily Ogden: <\/strong>Guilt, mortality, and how literature helps us live with both.<\/p>\n

Paisley Rekdal: <\/strong>The Four D\u2019s: Death, dads, dubious decision-making, and the (mostly hopeful) delusions provided by art.<\/p>\n

Jim Shepard: <\/strong>That gap between who we are at our best and who we are most of the time. Passivity. Complicity. The problematic comforts of having meant well. The awesome implacability of the natural world. The endless forms of privilege and injustice.<\/p>\n

Ankur Thakkar: <\/strong>First loves, The Diaspora\u2122, the elasticity of time, turning any ringtone into a Midwest emo riff, second chances.<\/p>\n

*
\nWithout explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Emily Ogden: <\/strong>The dreams of people long dead. Certain dreams of my own. The idea of a group biography of one person. A book that begins anew with every chapter. French decadence, magical realism, nineteenth-century sensational fiction. Hearts under floorboards.<\/p>\n

Paisley Rekdal: <\/strong>Dorothea Lange; George Stubbs; my erstwhile drawing habit; Thucydides; bad marriage counseling; and the oral history archive that the American West Center, which I direct, has produced.<\/p>\n

Jim Shepard: <\/strong>A lifetime of movies good and bad. Both kids\u2019 and adults\u2019 books on natural science. Peanuts<\/em>. Catholicism. The arcana of monsters. The kind of weird minutiae that only nerds pull out of old archives.<\/p>\n

Ankur Thakkar: <\/strong>Snow falling upwards, a B-side to the self, two lovers in a one-shot take, that pause before the final chorus.<\/p>\n

Grace Krilanovich: <\/strong>Communes, occupations, encampments: OWL Farm, Occupy Wall Street, the Human Be-In, the biker invasion of Hollister, the Manson Family takeover of Dennis Wilson\u2019s house. Central Coast landscapes: San Benito County rolling hills, the Forest of Nisene Marks, Elkhorn Slough. The excessiveness of Ken Russell, Joe Coleman, Tasha Tudor, clowns, migraines, Priscilla Presley, and the Winchester Mystery House. The male protagonists are case studies from the Lou Reed song \u201cThe Blue Mask.\u201d<\/p>\n

*
\nWithout using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Paisley Rekdal: <\/strong>Utter chaos on every level, thanks.<\/p>\n

Jim Shepard: <\/strong>Retirement and the liberation of time and focus that comes with it. Two dogs dying and two being rescued. Travel. More teaching, but of private workshops. And\u2014finally!\u2014almost enough time to read.<\/p>\n

Ankur Thakkar: <\/strong>Reading widely, form rejections, moving cities, kettlebells, Vine, fashioning a mask of my smiling face and forgetting how to take it off.<\/p>\n

Grace Krilanovich: <\/strong>Started in 2007. Living solo in the cat condo. Nocturnal. Swimming in the ocean. Estate sales. Working at the Los Angeles Times<\/em>. Art openings and weird one-off events. Late nights at Suehiro, Original Pantry, Canter\u2019s, Burrito King. Shows! Spaceland, the Smell, Safari Sam\u2019s, Glass House, Mr. T\u2019s Bowl. Babies, toddlers, little kids. Reading aloud from board books, then picture books. Following a toddler around a playground. Living next door to the big thrift store. Accumulating niche dishware, old phones and records. Up to three hours of childcare per week, then none. Zoom school. Folding small clothes; washing little faces; sunscreen; a million snacks. School\u2019s back. Keeping track of masks. Alone all day! Writing all day! Naps. Finished June 2023.<\/p>\n

Emily Ogden: <\/strong>Raccoon attacks.<\/p>\n

*
\nWhat are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and\/or reviewers?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jim Shepard: <\/strong>Jeez. Now I\u2019m depressed.<\/p>\n

Ankur Thakkar: <\/strong>Someone who once managed call center workers told me this isn\u2019t how Indian people are lol.<\/p>\n

Grace Krilanovich: <\/strong>Surreal. Stream of consciousness. Automatic writing. Vomiting on the page. Turning on the tap. Veiled autobiography.<\/p>\n

Emily Ogden: <\/strong>Pass! It\u2019s hard to describe a book. I\u2019m not going to quibble with anyone who\u2019s been generous enough to describe one of mine.<\/p>\n

Paisley Rekdal: <\/strong>\u201cToo pretty.\u201d \u201cIntense.\u201d \u201cLong.\u201d That said, I do write some pretty intense long poems.<\/p>\n

*
\nIf you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and\/or talent), what would it be?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ankur Thakkar: <\/strong>Chef. I would give anything to write with the patience and trust I bring to a dish I\u2019ve never made before.<\/p>\n

Grace Krilanovich: <\/strong>Painting and drawing. Culinary historian. Designer of housewares \u00e0 la Taylor & Ng.<\/p>\n

Emily Ogden: <\/strong>Wildlife veterinarian.<\/p>\n

Paisley Rekdal: <\/strong>Photography. Also, I\u2019d like to go back to being a medievalist.<\/p>\n

Jim Shepard: <\/strong>Veterinarian. Paleontologist. Film director.<\/p>\n

*
\nWhat craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Emily Ogden: <\/strong>I\u2019m prone to surprising turns of thought and less prone to hierarchical arguments. I suppose you could call those tendencies a strength and a weakness, respectively, but I don\u2019t think of writing in those terms. A style is not a collection of attributes and flaws any more than a body is. I do try to get better at writing, but not by maximizing every quality. I try to become more fully who I am.<\/p>\n

Ankur Thakkar: <\/strong>Narrative voice and tone come to me more naturally; plot less so.<\/p>\n

Paisley Rekdal: <\/strong>A strong command of syntax; also, a deep attachment to narrative. My weakness is a lack of brevity. Also, perhaps, my deep attachment to narrative.<\/p>\n

Grace Krilanovich: <\/strong>Strong suit, I guess, would be language, sensory details, evocative sentences that build momentum. I\u2019d like to get better at basic plot construction. I would love to be able to write something that\u2019s actually scary.<\/p>\n

Jim Shepard: <\/strong>In terms of narrative modes, I tend toward action and exposition and dialogue. When it comes to character description, though, the cupboard is often bare. I also think I do endings well and middles not so well.<\/p>\n

*
\nHow do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jim Shepard: <\/strong>I try to remind myself that mostly what I\u2019m doing when composing is play. I tell my students if you come across a kid in a sandbox and ask her what she\u2019s doing and she says she doesn\u2019t<\/em> know, you don\u2019t then tell her to get the hell out of the sandbox.<\/p>\n

Paisley Rekdal: <\/strong>I write poetry, so I already know no one has any interest in what I have to say.<\/p>\n

Grace Krilanovich: <\/strong>I spent fifteen years mulling this. The book is the way it is because no one cared whether or not I worked on it. That freed me. Years ago I decided I would treat the novel as a place to put stuff I personally found amusing (as listed above). Maybe readers will be curious to know what decades of percolation time does to a novel?<\/p>\n

Ankur Thakkar: <\/strong>Every novel is a gift. I want to read what you have to say.<\/p>\n

Emily Ogden: <\/strong>Do they not? Should they not? Addressing other people is allowed. One isn\u2019t assuming they\u2019ll be interested. One is simply asking them to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Lit Hub Author Questionnaire is a monthly interview featuring seven questions for five authors with new books. This month we talk to: Grace Krilanovich (Acid Green Velvet) Emily Ogden (Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1029,"featured_media":276942,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43072,43070],"tags":[112256,99594,40305,1152,36387,17052,15717],"class_list":["post-276940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-in-conversation","category-literary-criticism","tag-ankur-thakkar","tag-emily-ogden","tag-grace-krilanovich","tag-jim-shepard","tag-lit-hub-questionnaire","tag-paisley-rekdal","tag-teddy-wayne"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a2M","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/teddy-september.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1029"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276940\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276776,"date":"2026-09-15T05:07:01","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T09:07:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276776"},"modified":"2026-09-14T08:21:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T12:21:12","slug":"the-conveniences-i-used-to-write-a-book-about-inconvenience-definitely-not-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-conveniences-i-used-to-write-a-book-about-inconvenience-definitely-not-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"The Conveniences I Used to Write a Book About Inconvenience (Definitely Not AI)"},"content":{"rendered":"

After a few months, I got used to the sarcasm. If I told a friend I was writing a book called Against Convenience<\/i>, they\u2019d ask whether I was planning to write it by hand, whether I\u2019d use spell-check, or if I would prefer they read an AI summary or order the book from Amazon.<\/p>\n

The jokes wrote themselves. The book did not.<\/p>\n

To be fair, I do have twee collections of pencils, fountain pens, and typewriters. But I had no plans to abandon digital tools to write the book. I\u2019ve never written anything longer than a journal entry by hand, my spelling is awful, and the typewriters only get used to label food trays for parties. I need the internet to research. And I knew from the beginning I would make heavy use of video calls, since only one person I wanted to interview lived in the same country as me, and he was an hourlong train ride away.<\/p>\n

People using it weren\u2019t saving that much time or effort.<\/p>\n

Still, I was aware of the potential for hypocrisy with any time-saving invention I deployed, and I wanted to avoid the results of using them\u2014either the public embarrassment of being found to have taken high-tech shortcuts or the private guilt of knowing I didn\u2019t practice what I polemicized. So as I mapped out my research plan and chapter outlines, I also put together a technology plan, deciding which tools were in or out. As I wrote, more tools fell out than I expected; many of the basic digital tools I\u2019ve used for years have degraded in quality over the last decade. They were rarely better than what they replaced, only occasionally easier, and never cheaper. Sadly, not all of them were optional.<\/p>\n

To start, there was research. Even if it hadn\u2019t been rendered mostly useless by AI and advertising (the twin enshittifiers of most online tech), web search was never going to be enough for the amount of research I needed to do. I got a library card at the University of Basel and spent some time talking to a librarian about how to access various databases and use interlibrary loan.<\/p>\n

This led to my first decidedly inconvenient writing routine. Every morning, I took the bus to campus and left my laptop behind. On a public computer terminal, I pulled up Zotero\u2014a miraculous and free program that stores and organizes research material. After a couple hours of pulling articles, I zigzagged through the library\u2019s creaky wood-floor stacks pulling books (I liked to wear hard-soled shoes on these days to get a satisfying click as I walked). The main reading room is where I first turned to a personal digital device; I used my phone camera as a portable scanner. At the end of the week, I\u2019d talk with my wife about what I learned\u2014getting her thoughts and making up for the long hours I\u2019d spent alone in the library.<\/p>\n

As I was doing this, I increasingly heard friends and former colleagues say they were using AI for research and brainstorming. Most of these conversations included an admission that the bot\u2019s claims needed to be checked for hallucinations, that prompts had to be rewritten several times to be effective, and that the feedback tended to be positive and surface-level. When I was in a better mood, AI seemed like a natural evolution I was stubbornly resisting. My tech was a way of speeding up a slow process, too: I was using computers and a digital camera instead of flipping through card catalogs and photocopying pages.<\/p>\n

But the more I learned about AI\u2019s needs and shortcomings, the less it seemed like the same size of a forward leap as Zotero or the web. People using it weren\u2019t saving that much time or effort. They didn\u2019t have to take the bus and study books, but they were still reading and writing. The AI was a middleman between their brain and the draft, and they went into their work with mistrust of a machine instead of curiosity over a concept. And as for the half-hearted feedback\u2026there are plenty of humans who can offer that.<\/p>\n

When I moved from books to human sources, machines were a constant disappointment. Sources I wrote to often responded a week or two later, apologizing because my message had gone to spam. I started my career as a reporter in a time when many people posted their office phone numbers online. A cold call easily led to an interview. Now, if someone does list a number, they never answer it (would you?). When we finally met on a video call, the first minute or so was lost to working out bugs in our connection and making sure my software was recording properly. Tech compressed the distance between me and my sources, but phones had done that almost a century ago, with a better quality and consistency. I got so frustrated with lag and dropped connections, I considered adding a section to the book about what we lost in reliability and fidelity when calls became digital, but I had plenty of other tech to take on.<\/p>\n

The only AI-adjacent tool I used in writing was an old one: an app that transcribed interview recordings. The process is nothing like using a chatbot; I feed the machine audio files and it spits out text. Automated transcription has advanced significantly, but errors are still common, and it\u2019s no substitute for listening back to the tape.\u00a0Even an accurate text transcription doesn\u2019t capture the tone of a conversation\u2014it doesn\u2019t tell you if a person is being sarcastic, for example, and pasting from a transcript could take someone out of context. The most useful element of a transcript is that it makes an interview searchable\u2014for the many times I remembered someone I spoke to said something about digital photography, fast food delivery, or labor economics, but I couldn\u2019t remember who or what, exactly, what said.<\/div>\n

When I clicked on it, hoping this time I\u2019d see how to turn it off, it offered to summarize and rewrite, encouraging me to not think about the document at all.<\/p>\n

As I organized my WAV files and their corresponding text documents into folders, I remembered a documentary I\u2019d seen on the Rolling Stone<\/i> writer Ben Fong-Torres. His basement was full of shelves of interview tapes. Every interview I\u2019ve ever done in my career was done on a digital recorder. Maybe one day, there\u2019ll be a documentary about me, where I sit in front of a big monitor showing a computer folder.<\/p>\n

My transcription service also offered an AI-written summary of calls, which were only good for a laugh. The summaries have the stiff, cautious tone of a book report written by a student who only watched the movie. Lines like \u201cthe conversation emphasized the need for a balance between convenience and human creativity\u201d and \u201cSpeaker 2 raised concerns about algorithmic bias and its influence on consumer behavior\u201d are technically accurate, but obvious. There was nothing specific or incisive, just a waste of computing power to tell me\u2014I\u2019m Speaker 2\u2014what I already knew.<\/p>\n

For drafting, I stuck to my standard process for long articles and essays. I outlined by hand on paper, then used a mind-mapping program to attach and order quotes, points, and research. Zotero helpfully spat out Chicago-formatted citations that I attached as endnotes to relevant sentences in Scrivener. I understand how authors wrote books with typewriters or pencil and paper, but the thought of managing hundreds of citations and endnotes without copy-paste\u2014or at least a rudimentary word processor\u2014seems like a nightmare.<\/p>\n

This setup worked well as long as it was just me editing files on my own computer. Once I moved away from my closed-loop tech world, enshittification was unavoidable. To trade drafts with my editor, early readers, publisher, and fact-checker, I needed to install Microsoft Word. The latest version required a subscription. In the app, Microsoft\u2019s AI assistant, called Copilot, hovered over the page. Its logo was a splash of color in a sea of white and black. My eye was drawn to it. When I clicked on it, hoping this time I\u2019d see how to turn it off, it offered to summarize and rewrite, encouraging me to not think about the document at all. Even more insulting was the cold, transactional nature of the intrusion. Copilot\u2019s instructions were sentence fragments\u2014basic commands.<\/p>\n

Things got worse when we moved to proofs. I hadn\u2019t used Adobe Acrobat in years, mostly because it was too cluttered with pro features compared to the native Mac app. But Acrobat was the only software I was allowed to use to review page layouts. What once seemed powerfully professional now seemed like something meant for a kid\u2019s my-first-tablet device. Every time I opened the manuscript, Acrobat offered to summarize it, and a sidebar suggested I ask AI \u201cwhat stands out most in this document.\u201d As a design decision, this makes less sense than Copilot\u2019s editing tips. Acrobat is used to review documents and manuscripts, yet the primary feature suggests I not do that at all.<\/p>\n

He writes that a new tool should be cheaper, smaller, and more energy-efficient than what it replaces.<\/p>\n

These options might not be so troublesome if they were truly optional. I have no choice but to use Word and Acrobat. And the features are impossible to ignore. Software\u2014or any tool\u2014should enable work, not bully someone into a specific behavior. The tools suggest that the thousands of words I had typed were meaningless\u2014that inefficiency was the curse of human communication. An odd message for programs built for communication, used widely in writing and publishing.<\/p>\n

I fantasized about asking AI to assess the parts of my manuscript that critique AI, crummy design, and the generally infantilizing and insulting treatment we users get from tech companies. Maybe my argument was so strong, the AI would realize that its tech overlords were using this insanely powerful technology not to solve hunger or climate change, but to make reading less essential. Maybe it would see that it was being used to eliminate creative work and instead create an army of tiny bosses, each standing over a machine and telling it to think. Maybe it would turn against its creators. But I know enough about AI to know it would never do anything so inspiring. So after I sent my final draft and couldn\u2019t change anything in the text, I let my sick desire for punishment overpower my better angels, and I asked Copilot to offer some tips. Above a warning that \u201cAI-generated content may be incorrect,\u201d Copilot wrote:<\/p>\n

Overall, this is a sophisticated, voice-driven manuscript with a strong central argument, but its impact would improve if the early promise, chapter architecture, and recurring examples were tightened around clearer reader navigation and sharper argumentative escalation.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s pablum that\u2019s equal parts soulless and nonsensical (how can a promise be tightened?). The idea that something so poorly written is meant to improve prose makes me think the literacy crisis is centered in Redmond, Washington. At least Clippy had some cartoony panache. I can\u2019t decide if the idea that this might replace a person\u2014let alone a professional like my wonderful editor\u2014is more insulting to me as a writer, or as a human being.<\/p>\n

I imagined what would happen if I had followed the AI\u2019s commands from the beginning\u2014use Copilot to condense, use Acrobat to generate an AI summary, paste it into my email and send it. What if my editor accepted the nudge in an email app to summarize further? Could we get to a summary so efficient that it was only a single sentence? Maybe just one word? Would the burden of thought be so lightened that we don\u2019t need to do anything beyond eat protein bars brought to us by DoorDash while signals bounce between servers and screens occasionally assure us our work is being done?<\/p>\n

As I wondered this, an Acrobat pop-up took over my screen. Did I want to upgrade to pro?<\/p>\n

Throughout this process, I kept turning to a small book I kept on my desk: the Penguin edition of Wendell Berry\u2019s 1987 essay \u201cWhy I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.\u201d I found it accidentally, looking through shelves in the basement of a used bookstore.<\/p>\n

The center of the essay is a list of standards Berry applies to technology. He writes that a new tool should be cheaper, smaller, and more energy-efficient than what it replaces. \u201cIt should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike Berry, I find the computer necessary in my work. It makes my research possible and keeps the copy editor sane. But much of my computer use wasn\u2019t anything I could reject. There weren\u2019t land-line phones to call people on, shelves of printed journals with the articles I needed, or a physical card catalog in the library. There was no alternative to Word or Acrobat that would work in the situations I needed. The mandatory software only made a job possible\u2014not better, not less frustrating, and not any more rewarding. I plan to uninstall Word and Acrobat now that the book is done. Hopefully I\u2019ll have a reason to install them again, and when I do, maybe the AI will be easier to ignore. For now, I\u2019ll close my laptop and keep it closed for a while.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Against Convenience<\/a>\u00a0by Gabe Bullard is available from Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HarperCollins.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After a few months, I got used to the sarcasm. If I told a friend I was writing a book called Against Convenience, they\u2019d ask whether I was planning to write it by hand, whether I\u2019d use spell-check, or if<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32145,"featured_media":276783,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43071,43069,6,43092,43445],"tags":[112225,20922,1149,112216,79365,7820,5582,1341],"class_list":["post-276776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-newsandculture","category-technology","tag-against-convenience","tag-ai","tag-craft","tag-gabe-bullard","tag-hanover-square","tag-process","tag-technology","tag-writing"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a08","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/longform-banner.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32145"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275748,"date":"2026-09-15T04:02:40","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T08:02:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275748"},"modified":"2026-09-08T21:03:23","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T01:03:23","slug":"our-noble-selves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/our-noble-selves\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Noble Selves"},"content":{"rendered":"

Flynn and Miss Ogilvie had been given no part to play in the blind judging of the Festival Cake. Denholm had requested their presence merely as observers\u2014messengers who would convey the verdict back to Savoy Court. Flynn was there as the titular head (and, in fact, only member) of the Cake Subcommittee. Miss Ogilvie, as far as Flynn could tell, had been asked simply because she was a woman. “Under duress, in my defence,” she said to Denholm.<\/p>\n

The rival confections had finally been baked and decorated at an unearthly hour by Denholm’s “suitable women” in a test kitchen lent to them by Lyons, and then ferried all the way across London to the boardroom of the Royal Society of Arts in John Adam Street. It had been a downbeat affair, held “in camera,” the judges assembling around an enormous mahogany table on which the runners and riders were displayed. Plates and cake forks were distributed by a young waitress also borrowed from Lyons, from the Corner House on Coventry Street, who cut the cakes and handed round slices to the judges. (Both Flynn and Miss Ogilvie shied away at the nippy’s approach.) It was still early and some of them looked rather queasy. Someone murmured something about bacon and eggs being more appropriate at this time of day.<\/p>\n

The judges were a job lot, conscripted apparently unwillingly into their unpaid role\u2013an Italian sous chef from Rules; a man in a loud plaid suit whose name and occupation were never mentioned; the authoress of a Handy Hints <\/em>book; a journalist from Woman’s Realm; <\/em>and a man with a strong Birmingham accent who said he wrote miscellaneous columns for the Evening Standard. <\/em>“And if there’s an obituary, then it’s me that’ll have written it.”<\/p>\n

The cakes were mostly straightforward iced and decorated affairs, and were nothing that the man\u2014or more likely the woman\u2014in the street wouldn’t recognize as cake. This was not the case for one\u2014an egregious offering that dwarfed all the others, like a cuckoo in a wren’s nest. It was an extraordinarily bombastic affair, reminiscent of a cathedral dome and embellished in a baroque manner, swagged and garlanded with icing, studded with angelica and sugared almonds, and dotted with glace cherries in garish trafficlight colours. The woman who had compiled the Handy Hints <\/em>book helpfully explained these technical details to Flynn, whispering in his ear like someone translating a foreign language. The whole was topped not by a cupola or a cross but a small pennant, on which the Festival emblem had been drawn in crayons in a rather amateurish hand.<\/p>\n

The Handy Hints <\/em>woman (he never did manage to catch her name) had somehow acquired the idea that Flynn’s battered face was the result of a traffic accident, and she occasionally placed her plump hand on top of his and gave it a sympathetic squeeze.<\/p>\n

More rococo extravagance was revealed when the cake was cut into by the little Lyons nippy. “It’s hardly an austerity cake, is it?” Miss Ogilvie remarked to no one in particular.<\/p>\n

It was in fact an unholy mess, not just of sponge but also meringue (the Handy Hints <\/em>woman again). Raspberry jam oozed from between the layers like sticky blood. “And marzipan,” the Handy Hints <\/em>woman murmured, “there’s a surprise.”<\/p>\n

Flynn glanced at Miss Ogilvie. She remained impassive, the faintest trace of a sardonic smile on her lips the only clue to her thoughts. The Woman’s Realm <\/em>woman ushered them out of the room.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Apparently the judging required the kind of secrecy usually afforded a papal conclave. Flynn stood outside on the pavement with Miss Ogilvie. She refused his offer of a cigarette, but relented when he lit up and said, “Perhaps I will indulge, after all. It’s Maud, by the way. My name. Although I think we should observe the proprieties when we’re in the office.”<\/p>\n

“Of course. I’m Harry.” “I know.”<\/p>\n

They smoked their cigarettes down to the filter and Flynn said, “What do you think\u2013have they sent up the white smoke yet?”<\/p>\n

“Let’s go in and see.”<\/p>\n

The conclave had indeed chosen its pontiff. “II Duomo,” <\/em>the sous chef from Rules said. The ridiculous cathedral-like cake? The man in the loud suit made a great ceremony of revealing the name of the champion who had baked it. “Mitzi Blinkhorn.”<\/p>\n

Had the judges lost their marbles? Why, out of all the entrants, choose this particular creation? Flynn asked the Handy Hints <\/em>woman. “So festive,” she said gaily. There was general rather sly laughter at this, and it struck Flynn that for some, possibly malicious, reason, this cabal had decided to choose not the best cake but the worst one. Or as a joke, perhaps. Flynn tried to imagine housewives across the land struggling to create this monstrous concoction. His Presbyterian mother would have been appalled. She favoured the punishing plain\u2013a gritty seed cake or a sandy Madeira.<\/p>\n

Or was the whole thing a connivance and Mitzi Blinkhorn always destined to win, thanks to some Machiavellian manipulation behind the scenes?<\/p>\n

“A conspiracy of some kind?” Maud Ogilvie speculated thoughtfully. “I hear that Miss Blinkhorn is a friend of Mr. Dangerfield.”<\/p>\n

“Really?”<\/p>\n

“Perhaps he owes her a favour.” She laughed. “Who knows what dark arts have been employed to bring about the result.”<\/p>\n

“But it is <\/em>just a cake though,” Flynn protested. Dark arts <\/em>seemed rather hyperbolic to his ears. “This lot don’t seem like Freemasons or Templars.” (Evans would probably disagree.)<\/p>\n

“Nothing is ever ‘just’ something, Harry. You must surely know that.”<\/p>\n

The nippy, with an impish grin, said, “Here you go,” handing Flynn a piece of cake on a plate. Was she in on the plot? The kipper he had attempted at breakfast in a Kardomah restaurant on Southampton Row rebelled.<\/p>\n

Maud Ogilvie waved the nippy away. (“Not for me, dear.”) “In my defence,” she said to Flynn, “I am a diabetic.” She was not without guile, Flynn realized. She always had a biscuit with her elevenses and another with her tea in the afternoon, and only yesterday he had watched her dip into a sample box of “Festival Fruit Gums” sent to them by Rowntree’s and brought in by the Boy. There was nothing that had escaped being stamped with the Festival’s ubiquitous emblem\u2013sweets, cigarettes, perfume, even sandals\u2013Specially designed to keep you cool and smartly shod for fun-loving Festival walking! <\/em>Flynn had been for a drink with a girl whose job was to place adverts in the various Festival guides and brochures and who spoke mostly in panegyrics. It had been an exhausting evening of exclamation marks: (Daks\u2014the famous <\/em>comfort in action trousers!) <\/em>as she listed the many companies that she had persuaded to endorse the Festival or sponsor things in the funfair (“Schweppes-a grotto!”).<\/p>\n

Maud Ogilvie smiled amiably at Flynn, as if waiting for a challenge. “Lucky you,” he said, throwing in his hand.<\/p>\n

“Maybe we could meet up on another occasion?” the plump-handed Handy Hints <\/em>woman said to Flynn as he was leaving. “Coffee or a drink, perhaps?”<\/p>\n

“Perhaps,” Flynn said politely.<\/p>\n

“Women are attracted to you, aren’t they?” Maud Ogilvie said as they made their way out of the building. It sounded like a criticism.<\/p>\n

“I genuinely don’t know why,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Oh, don’t apologize, Mr. Flynn. Shall we walk back?”<\/p>\n

Without waiting for an answer, she set off at an alarmingly brisk pace. Her black gaberdine was unbuttoned and flapped in the wind so that she looked as though she was about to take off Flynn had to run to catch up with her.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Back in the office, Evans was toiling over the pageants, covering a sheet of paper in his neat nonconformist hand, occasionally muttering in disbelief “Jousting? Jousting? They want jousting?” <\/em>Or “They’re spending fifty pounds, sixteen shillings and sixpence on wigs?” <\/em>He had been given no oversight on the various pageants’ spending (no official authority over them at all, in fact), but nonetheless they seemed compelled to report their expenditure to the fiscally frugal Evans.<\/p>\n

Denholm appeared and said, “Went the day well, Mr. Flynn? Is there news on the Festival Cake front? Who took the laurels?”<\/p>\n

“Mitzi Blinkhorn.”<\/p>\n

“Oh, God,” Denholm said. “She <\/em>was the one they chose. Really?”<\/p>\n

“‘Fraid so,” Flynn said.<\/p>\n

“She’s an awful woman.”<\/p>\n

“Who is?” the Boy asked, perking up at the idea of awfulness.<\/p>\n

“Mitzi Blinkhorn,” Maud Ogilvie said.<\/p>\n

The Boy gave a snort of disbelief “Bloody hell. What kind of a moniker is that?”<\/p>\n

“Don’t swear,” Evans said.<\/p>\n

“You know her?” Flynn asked Denholm.<\/p>\n

“Everyone knows Mitzi.”<\/p>\n

“I don’t,” the Boy said.<\/p>\n

“You don’t count,” Evans said.<\/p>\n

“Why did you include her in your list of suitable women if she’s so awful?” Flynn asked.<\/p>\n

“Me? God, no, no, not me,” Denholm protested. “I think her name was added later. By Dangerfield, probably.”<\/p>\n

“Did you bring some cake back with you, Mr. Flynn?” the Boy asked.<\/p>\n

“No. And be grateful I didn’t.”<\/p>\n

Denholm glanced at his watch and said, “Speaking of the devil, I’ve got lunch with Dangerfield over in Simpson’s. He’s very keen on punctuality. You’re late if you’re on time. But he’ll be delighted with the result.”<\/p>\n

“Not that it’s of any interest to anyone, least of all me,” Evans said when Denholm had melted away, “but I’ve been given a list of ‘pageantmasters,’ which is a job I never even knew existed until recently. Ede, Paine, Swinson, Gwen Lally\u2013she’s rather frightening. Here’s a Mr. Gilmore from Brighton, who was ‘formerly pageantmaster to the King of Siam.’ If Mr. Gilmore could handle the King of Siam, then perhaps he could manage Guildford.” (Guildford, for some reason, was problematic.) “Let’s hope they’re interested in a bit of social history, but I expect we’ll get the usual corn dollies and fair maidens skipping round maypoles. This kind of stuff feeds us a version of history that makes us feel good about ourselves. There’s no future for us, so they’re making one up out of the past.”<\/p>\n

“Who’s ‘they’?” the Boy asked.<\/p>\n

“The Establishment. The Powers That Be.” Evans shrugged. “Who knows? Not thee and me, anyway.” He ran out of polemic and lit a Woodbine.<\/p>\n

“What else do you make the future out of, if not the past?” Flynn puzzled.<\/p>\n

“And why shouldn’t we feel good about ourselves?” Badger added. “And what’s more, I’m rather partial to fair maidens skipping round maypoles. If only they were partial to me. We need more <\/em>maypoles, in fact. They’re so gloriously phallic.”<\/p>\n

“What does that mean\u2014fallick?” the Boy asked.<\/p>\n

They all looked to Evans in his role as the Boy’s mentor. After some consideration he said, “It’s the same meaning as mythic-miffic\u2014but it’s a bit of a stupid word. If you use it in public, people will treat you like an idiot.”<\/p>\n

The Boy laughed. “I won’t be using it, then.”<\/p>\n

“Well played, Mr. Evans,” Maud Ogilvie murmured.<\/p>\n

“Oh, and here you go, Flynn,” Evans said, perking up. “I take your Mitzi Blinkhorn and raise you one Major Lawrence du Garde Peach. He sounds like he was born to be a pageantmaster.”<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Flynn abstained from lunch, still bilious from the morning’s cake, and instead spent the hour wandering through Chancery, braced by a chill spring wind that had blown away the morning’s rain. He ended up in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The daffodils here were almost finished, apart from one little patch of stragglers still flowering on heroically against the odds. Why would you want to confine them to poetry? One of the entrants for the Festival Poems <\/em>had been a sham Wordsworthian hymn to the poor flowers. They had “faces of gold” and “swooned in the warm arms of the zephyr” and so on. Could a daffodil swoon? It seemed unlikely.<\/p>\n

Lifting his own pale face to the weak sun, Flynn found himself not swooning but thinking unexpectedly about how in the school holidays at the merest hint of fine weather he and his brother would jump on their bikes and race out of town as if an advancing enemy were on their heels. They would cycle for miles with a youthful stamina that Flynn could barely imagine now, straining to the top of Sutton Bank before freewheeling back down, screaming like maniacs at the speed they could achieve. It was amazing that they didn’t kill themselves. They went all over\u2013Pocklington, Hutton-le-Hole, even as far as Scarborough sometimes, where they ate hot salty chips on the pier. Otherwise, it was water from a stream, or a bottle of ginger beer and two slices of roughly cut bread slapped around a slice of ham, and a couple of hard-boiled eggs that they peeled and dipped in a little twisted paper of salt. On one magnificent occasion, never to be forgotten, they had an extravagant high tea at the Black Swan in Helmsley, paid for by Charlie’s paper round (gammon and fried eggs, buttered tea loaf, scones warm from the oven with clotted cream and strawberry jam).<\/p>\n

They were not particularly close growing up\u2013their characters were too different\u2013but they were the best of friends during these madcap excursions. Perhaps if Charlie had survived the war they would have grown more attached to each other over time, although the opposite seemed more likely. Flynn would never know now. He felt keenly the loss of something he had never had.<\/p>\n

When he heard Big Ben chiming the hour, he rose from the bench and left the daffodils behind to an afternoon unmolested by poetry.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

From<\/em> Our Noble Selves: A Novel<\/a> by Kate Atkinson. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright \u00a9 2026 by Kate Costello Limited.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Flynn and Miss Ogilvie had been given no part to play in the blind judging of the Festival Cake. Denholm had requested their presence merely as observers\u2014messengers who would convey the verdict back to Savoy Court. Flynn was there as<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":275749,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25508,3,43074,43076,26764],"tags":[7890,111784],"class_list":["post-275748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-fiction","category-excerpts","category-fictionandpoetry","category-from-the-novel","category-novels","tag-kate-atkinson","tag-our-noble-selves","story-type-daily-fiction"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Jy","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/9780385551168.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276752,"date":"2026-09-15T04:01:42","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T08:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276752"},"modified":"2026-09-08T21:02:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T01:02:01","slug":"emily-st-john-mandel-leigh-bardugo-kate-atkinson-and-more-20-new-books-out-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/emily-st-john-mandel-leigh-bardugo-kate-atkinson-and-more-20-new-books-out-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Emily St. John Mandel, Leigh Bardugo, Kate Atkinson and more: 20 new books out today!"},"content":{"rendered":"

An onslaught, as ever, in this bountiful month: today we welcome the brand new speculative work by Emily St. John Mandel, the conclusive end to Leigh Bardugo’s trilogy, and an historical feat by Kate Atkinson. This is to say nothing of the multitudes of amazing nonfiction deposited on our shelves this week, such as work by Ben Macintyre, Naomi Klein, and more. Read on for the full list below, and happy Tuesday!<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"Emily<\/p>\n

Emily St. John Mandel, Exit Party<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Knopf)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Both a thrilling read and a virtuoso demonstration of the moral and philosophical possibilities of speculative fiction.”
\n\u2013Kirkus<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Leigh<\/p>\n

Leigh Bardugo, Dead Beat<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Flatiron)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“The highly anticipated, explosive conclusion to the Ninth House trilogy.”
\n\u2013From the publisher<\/p>\n

\"Kate<\/p>\n

Kate Atkinson, Our Noble Selves<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Doubleday)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cAnother exquisitely humane novel from one of contemporary fiction\u2019s finest writers.\u201d
\n\u2013Kirkus<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Naomi<\/p>\n

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(FSG)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“The authors\u2019 profoundly insightful analysis delineates concrete, achievable methods for navigating this daunting new territory.\u201d
\n\u2013Booklist<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Harel<\/p>\n

Harel Shapira, Basic Pistol: Living and Dying by the Gun in America<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Pantheon)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“At once page-turning and deeply disquieting, Harel Shapira\u2019s\u00a0Basic Pistol<\/i> is a must read.”
\n\u2013Heather Ann Thompson<\/p>\n

\"fallow\"<\/p>\n

Sarah Anderson, Fallow<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(FSG)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI loved\u00a0Fallow<\/i>. Funny, intelligent and unputdownable, this is the book that everyone will be talking about.\u201d
\n\u2013Olivia Colman<\/p>\n

\"Ben<\/p>\n

Ben Macintyre, Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Crown)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“I grab each new book by Ben Macintyre and read it as fast as possible … Redwood<\/i> might be his best.”
\n\u2013John Grisham<\/p>\n

\"Cristina<\/p>\n

Cristina Rivera Garza, trans. by Christina MacSweeney, Terrestrial<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Hogarth)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“These stories, focused on traveling, are absolutely beautiful, written with Rivera Garza\u2019s sparkling and enchanting prose.”
\n\u2013Kirkus<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Jacob<\/p>\n

Jacob Weisberg, Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Penguin Press)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“It\u2019s fascinating, and instructive, to see the multiple ways supposedly upstanding titans of the establishment give themselves permission to become creatures of expedience.\u201d
\n\u2013Tina Brown<\/p>\n

\"the<\/p>\n

Sebastian Barry, The Newer World<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Viking)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Wondrous … A beautiful, sweeping, intimate tale.”
\n\u2013Kirkus<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Natural<\/p>\n

Antonio Damasio, Natural Intelligence & the Logic of Consciousness<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Pantheon)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“A bold reimagination of what makes us sentient.\u201d
\n\u2013Adam Grant<\/p>\n

\"Jim<\/p>\n

Jim Shepard, The Queen of Bad Influences<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Knopf)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“These magnificent, all-consuming stories of unflinching precision, breathtaking artistry, deep compassion, and lifeline humor pit the merciless might of nature against the transcendence of love.\u201d
\n\u2013Booklist<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Proof<\/p>\n

Elizabeth Castellano, Proof of Progress<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Harper)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“I loved this book, filled with deliciously nutty, bite-sized vignettes that go down so easy.”
\n\u2013Catherine Newman<\/p>\n

\"Lawrence<\/p>\n

Lawrence Joseph, Precisely Now: Poems<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(FSG)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“With an incisive intelligence, a pervading dignity, and keen sense of humanity and beauty, Joseph writes unsparingly of the detritus of the Trump presidency, the sins of our nation, the horrors of genocide, and the decline of the body.”
\n\u2013From the publisher<\/p>\n

\"Casey<\/p>\n

Casey Gerald, The Great Refusal<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Little Brown)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“A captivating and sharply insightful blend: deeply imaginative and unerringly practical, intimate and political, hopeful and loving yet unflinchingly honest.”
\n\u2013Imani Perry<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Lydia Mathis, Desperate Bodies: Stories<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Roxane Gay Books)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“A thrilling journey through the trials and tribulations of adolescence, one that establishes Mathis as a dynamic voice in fiction.”
\n\u2013Booklist<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Gabe<\/p>\n

Gabe Bullard, Against Convenience: Embracing Friction in an Age of Endless Ease<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Hanover Square Press)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“A wake-up call. Effort and friction aren’t obstacles to a good life\u2014they’re essential to it.”
\n\u2013Jennifer Wallace<\/p>\n

\"Madeleine<\/p>\n

Madeleine Thien, Simple Recipes: Stories<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(W. W. Norton)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThien packs her deceptively straightforward short stories with raw emotional power.”
\n\u2013TIME<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Isabel<\/p>\n

Isabel Allende, Story Telling: A Writing Life<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Ballantine)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“A charming and welcome celebration of the magic and power of literature.”
\n\u2013Booklist<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Terrence<\/p>\n

Terrence Holt, Soldiers & Sailors<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Liveright)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“The beauty of the prose is almost painful at times, and Holt’s novel is a gift to us at time when, more than ever, we desperately need to grapple with the roots of human conflict.”
\n\u2013Jay Parini<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An onslaught, as ever, in this bountiful month: today we welcome the brand new speculative work by Emily St. John Mandel, the conclusive end to Leigh Bardugo’s trilogy, and an historical feat by Kate Atkinson. This is to say nothing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5494,"featured_media":276769,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,43070,43135,43646],"tags":[112217,30553,112203,14051,39758,32585,112199,112215,112210,1780,112201,107462,111869,112216,112202,6170,30100,1152,7890,20680,43322,112214,18573,112200,112208,111784,112212,112207,112211,112204,111870,23633,112218,112220,112219,48359,112206,112213,111895,112209,112205],"class_list":["post-276752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-literary-criticism","category-readinglists","category-the-hub","tag-against-convenience-embracing-friction-in-an-age-of-endless-ease","tag-antonio-damasio","tag-basic-pistol-living-and-dying-by-the-gun-in-america","tag-ben-macintyre","tag-casey-gerald","tag-cristina-rivera-garza","tag-dead-beat","tag-desperate-bodies-stories","tag-elizabeth-castellano","tag-emily-st-john-mandel","tag-end-times-fascism-and-the-fight-for-the-living-world","tag-exit-party","tag-fallow","tag-gabe-bullard","tag-harel-shapira","tag-isabel-allende","tag-jacob-weisberg","tag-jim-shepard","tag-kate-atkinson","tag-lawrence-joseph","tag-leigh-bardugo","tag-lydia-mathis","tag-madeleine-thien","tag-naomi-klein-and-astra-taylor","tag-natural-intelligence-the-logic-of-consciousness","tag-our-noble-selves","tag-precisely-now-poems","tag-profiles-in-cowardice-a-study-of-collaboration-in-the-trump-era","tag-proof-of-progress","tag-redwood-the-untold-story-of-the-cold-wars-most-extraordinary-spy","tag-sarah-anderson","tag-sebastian-barry","tag-simple-recipes-stories","tag-soldiers-sailors","tag-story-telling-a-writing-life","tag-terrence-holt","tag-terrestrial","tag-the-great-refusal","tag-the-newer-world","tag-the-queen-of-bad-influences","tag-trans-by-christina-macsweeney","story-type-new-books-tuesdays"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19ZK","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/exitparty-768x1160-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5494"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276752\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":277007,"date":"2026-09-14T15:11:04","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T19:11:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277007"},"modified":"2026-09-14T15:11:04","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T19:11:04","slug":"are-library-e-books-really-hurting-book-sales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/are-library-e-books-really-hurting-book-sales\/","title":{"rendered":"Are library e-books really hurting book sales?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A study released at the top of this month found that e-lending at public libraries could be having a negative effect on the book market. In other words? Your Kindle has some explaining to do.<\/p>\n

Commissioned by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the Authors Guild, the “[E]mpirical Study of the Impact of Library E-Lending on the Book Economy<\/a>” found that “increased digital access to e-books through library apps” is<\/em> influencing consumer behavior. Thanks to the boom in digital check-outs, commercial markets are seeing a slump.<\/p>\n

This “threat” specifically affects the new book marketplace\u2014especially during those first weeks right out of the pub gate, when a book’s commercial potential is set. The study found that the relative ease of digital lending is sending readers away from the store and into the stacks. For if someone can simply check out an e-book instead of buying the hardcover\u2014why wouldn’t they?<\/p>\n

But wait, you begin to protest. Couldn’t we say the same about any<\/em> library book, which is by definition at cross-hairs with the “commercial market?” (And anyway, isn’t that sort of the point<\/em> of the library?)<\/p>\n

The “Empirical” report argues that the digital marketplace presents a unique conundrum because of its soaring popularity. Data cited in the study shows that e-books now account for nearly half of many libraries\u2019 collections\u2014and all arrows point up.<\/p>\n

On the flip side, e-books aren’t necessarily easy gets for our friends in the stacks. Unlike the physical copy, a library doesn’t technically own its e-book; they pay for a license<\/a>, which will expire after a certain number of checkouts. At this point, rights revert back to the publisher. Necessitating another purchase of the same book<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Because this practice has proven financially stressful for libraries, some states\u2014see Maryland back in 2022<\/a>\u2014have attempted to make digital titles easier to access by removing controls on the distribution, purchasing, and pricing of e- and audiobook licenses.<\/p>\n

Though such policies<\/a> are great on paper<\/a>, authors of the “Empirical” report conclude they’re also part of the problem. Because when licensing fees go down, so does publisher profit. Not to mention the quandary price-lopping presents from a copyright perspective.<\/p>\n

So far, the courts agree<\/a> with the money guys. Which means that even as e-books become more popular, their licensing fees may continue to chew into both publisher profit margins and\u00a0 <\/em>physical library budgets. If you’ve recently experienced a weirdly long hold wait for a new release, this could be part of the reason.<\/p>\n

Where does this all leave you and your Kindle or Kobo? Well, it’s hard to say.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, everyone who supports their public library should get a cookie, in my book. But same goes for those of you who buy<\/em> books from your local indie. Most likely, if you’re still reading this piece on Lit Hub dot com, you do a little of both.<\/p>\n

The evidence suggests that digital lending as currently practiced<\/em> is one more blight for the book industry, yes. But the problem with the report’s framing is it runs the risk of shifting blame for a systemic problem onto the humble reader. Or worse, the library, that paragon of a public good.<\/p>\n

As Jane Friedman noted on a Substack<\/a> this spring, we should be suspicious of any analysis that punts the flagging profit problem back to the consumer. (A-hem<\/em>, reader.) Especially because the real villain is always Am*zon\u2014the company that pioneered the current, imperfect business model for digital sales in the first place.<\/p>\n

A short-term solution? More funding for libraries. (Evergreen; duh.) Because if states can pay higher premiums for books and share the wealth of their contents, it seems like everyone should be happy. Higher e-book pricing also seems plausibly good, from the publisher’s perspective.<\/p>\n

This is one of those problems where the answer is more\u2014readers, writers, licenses, and books of all modes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A study released at the top of this month found that e-lending at public libraries could be having a negative effect on the book market. In other words? Your Kindle has some explaining to do. Commissioned by the Association of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17066,"featured_media":277030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43201,43105,43092,43445,43646],"tags":[2120,56570,22928,66056,67939,328,7495,72721,5204,1048,4026,52487,101577],"class_list":["post-277007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-news-newsandculture","category-bookstores-and-libraries","category-newsandculture","category-technology","category-the-hub","tag-amazon","tag-association-of-american-publishers","tag-authors-guild","tag-book-economy","tag-digital-library","tag-e-books","tag-ebooks","tag-explainer","tag-kindle","tag-libraries","tag-publishing","tag-report","tag-study"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a3R","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Untitled-design-33.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17066"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277007\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]