Tania James on the Delightful Contempt in Her New Book
In Conversation with Lindsay Hunter on I'm a Writer But
Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they have, all the stuff they’re not able to get to, and the ways in which any of us get anything done. Plus: book recommendations, bad jokes, okay jokes, despair, joy, and anything else going on that week. Hosted by Lindsay Hunter.
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Today, Tania James discusses her new romp of a novel Loot and how it helped her re-find her way as a writer, staying in it over a long career, researching 18th century Mysore and Europe, working with Knopf, and more!
From the episode:
Tania James: I happened across this image—Tipu’s tiger—in a book, and I just thought, “That’s delightful to me.” That there’s this Indian ruler that I only barely knew about and that he had this bizarre thing made, basically making fun of the British, but also full of his contempt for them—I’d never seen anything like it. I wrote two chapters, and I wrote to my agent, and I said, “Can you just tell me if I should keep going?” She told me to keep going, and she said she would handcuff me to my desk if I didn’t.
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Tania James is the author of the novels The Tusk That Did the Damage and Atlas of Unknowns and the short-story collection Aerogrammes. Her fiction has appeared in Freeman’s, Granta, The New Yorker, O, The Oprah Magazine, One Story, and A Public Space. Tania has been a fellow of Ragdale, MacDowell, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. She teaches in the MFA program at George Mason University and lives in Washington, D.C.
